Development of a novel thermoelectric module based device for thermal stability measurement of phase change materials

摘要

A recently developed method for the thermal stability measurement of phase-change materials (PCMs) involves thermal cycling using a thermoelectric module as a heating and cooling element. However, the utility of this approach was found to have some limitations, mainly because the thermoelectric polarity is changed according to time rather than the actual sample temperature. A method for thermal cycling test, where the thermoelectric polarity is automatically changed according to the sample temperature was developed in this study. In addition, a new cartridge design in this device requires a small sample volume (1.53 cm(3)) and can be easily assembled and disassembled. This proposed device was tested on beeswax as a PCM sample. This is very important for savings PCMs material which usually expensive. The results showed that the apparatus had automatically cycled between the melting and cooling temperatures of beeswax. The thermal data showed that beeswax retains consistent melting and freezing temperatures after 1000 cycles, however, its heat of fusion degrades over repeated thermal cycling. This apparatus can be readily applied to study a wide range of PCMs for such as thermal energy storage materials for energy conservation. To our best knowledge, yet no study has been performed on this kind of equipment so far.