Phase Change Matters

• The U.S. Department of Energy has announced $33 million in research funding to advance technologies that work toward achieving the department's 2030 cost target of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour for CSP-generated electricity with at least 12 hours of thermal energy storage. "This research," DOE writes, "includes new materials and technologies that significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing, enable new energy storage technologies, and develop solutions that enable a solar field to operate autonomously without any human input."

• Walero racewear, which uses Outlast phase change technology to regulate temperature in race and rally drivers, has been put to the test on reigning British GT4 champion Jack Mitchell in a temperature-controlled race simulator. The tests were directed by racing performance coach Dean Fouache. On the first day, Mitchell, right, wore standard Nomex underwear; on the second day, he wore Walero underwear. Three measurements were recorded every five minutes during the hourlong tests: body temperature, heart rate and weight loss. In all three areas, Walero showed measurable advantages over the Nomex. "Jack sweated around 40 percent less in the Walero underwear and his average heart rate was eight beats less over the course of the hour," Fouache told Autosport magazine. "So, all in all, relatively conclusive results - even though it is a small comparison test."

• New this month from Central West Publishing in Australia: "Phase Change Materials," edited by Vikas Mittal, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi.

• The International Conference on Innovative Applied Energy in the United Kingdom earlier this month featured a number of experiments with phase change materials, including Auburn University's development of micro-encapsulated phase change materials that can be combined with many different media. Other PCM research included a bio-composite made with hemp lime concrete and a novel utilization of fly ash to encapsulate phase change materials.

• The 200th anniversary of the birth of physicist James Prescott Joule will be commemorated with the unveiling of a plaque in Sale, United Kingdom, in April. The English physicist and mathematician, who gave his name to the unit of energy, was born on Dec. 24, 1818, in Salford. He died in Sale in 1889.

• The deadline for submitting manuscripts for "Phase Change Materials of Buildings," a special issue of the journal Buildings, is Sunday, March 31. Dr. Morshed Alam of Australia's Swinburne University of Technology is the guest editor.

A PCM-based thermal energy storage system installed in an 11-story building at an Australian university used just 15 percent of its heat storage capacity to shift peak cooling load, according to researchers who monitored system performance for 25 months.

A team led by Morshed Alam of Swinburne University of Technology in Hawthorn found that the PCM reduced chiller cooling load by 12 to 37 percent in winter but remained inactive in summer, partly because the ambient temperature was not cold enough to charge the PCM tank. The tank was designed to reduce the daytime cooling load on the chiller by 33 percent.

The results of the study are reported in "Energy saving performance assessment and lessons learned from the operation of an active phase change materials system in a multi-storey building in Melbourne," published in Applied Energy earlier this year.

"The factors that contributed to the underperformance of active PCM system," the researchers concluded, "include mismatch between designed and actual operation of the PCM system, inefficient operation logic of the system, poor material quality, and limited knowledge of maintenance staffs during the operation stage."

The TES system, installed in the 11th floor of Swinburne's Advanced Manufacturing and Design Centre, completed in 2015, was designed to minimize the daytime cooling load on the chiller and increase the building energy efficiency. The system includes a 5x4x2-meter tank filled with 5,120 FlatIce PCM panels made by PCM Products Ltd. Each HDPE panel is 500x250x45 mm and is filled with a salt hydrate PCM with the melting temperature of 13–15 °C. Water is used as the heat transfer fluid.

The researchers reported two problems with the PCM: a "very high degree of supercooling" that slowed the solidification process and a measured latent heat capacity (53 joules per gram) that was much lower than the manufacturer's specification (160 J/g).

Alam, a senior research fellow at Swinburne's Centre for Sustainable Infrastructure, Department of Civil and Construction, answered a few questions about the research in an email interview.

Q: This the first comprehensive report I've seen that analyzes the actual performance of a PCM/TES system in a commercial building. Do you know of others? For example, has the TES system at Melbourne CH2 undergone this kind of analysis?

A: "I am aware of the PCM system installed in CH2 building in Melbourne. But no such study was carried out to understand the performance of the system. The system went out of order within 5-6 years."

Q: Any theory on why the PCM's thermal storage capacity of 53 J/g, as measured using differential scanning calorimetry, did not match the manufacturer's specified capacity of 160 J/g?

A: "The DSC test is widely used by the researchers around the world to test PCM capacity. But it may not be an appropriate approach to test PCM thermal energy storage capacity. That is why we are now in the process of conducting an experimental study where 6 degree Celsius chilled water will be supplied in a small PCM tank. We will measure the flow rate, melting and solidification temperature and time required to completely solidify and melt the PCM. Based on the result we will optimize the system."

Q: Have the researchers' recommendations been put into practice?

A: "We are now working with our facilities department to put the recommendations in practice. We need to finish the optimization and cost-benefit analysis study. Then we can define the ideal operating condition of PCM in this building. We will be able integrate those maybe before next summer in Australia."

I shared results of the paper with Zafer Ure of PCM Products Ltd. and asked him to comment on the authors' observations on supercooling and specified-vs-measured latent heat capacity.

"We have been supplying the same PCM for the last 20 years and many of the installations are 10~15 MWh levels," Ure wrote. "You cannot use the DSC machine to work out the latent heat for sulphate-based hydrated salts, it only picks up one of the chemicals in the mixture and gives you the data for that chemical. This is a well-known handicap for the DSC application for sulphate-based PCM testing. Moreover, DSC sample is less than gram quantities and this is a mixture of multiple salts, nucleating agent, stabilizers and thickening agent so if you do not pick up the correct mixture, which is very difficult unless you pick it up from the reactor vessel while you are making the PCM (i.e. while the agitators and mixers working at the correct temperature (some salts crystallize at room temperatures), you may not be able to pick up true sample.

"They took the sample out of one of the containers and no idea where and how they took the sample. If you do not have the true sample, especially lack of nucleating agent in the very small gram quantity sample, you can get it very wrong data as this is the case for their DSC. We would not ship any PCM unless QA release the goods and our records show the product supplied was within the standard capacity level. The actual latent heat can only be established using air test and actual freeze and melt profiles.

"If they managed to charge and discharge the tank fully they would have measured the tank performance which would have shown the true TES capacity. Sounds like their chilled water design and control did not allow that and therefore there is no way of evaluating the TES tank performance."

U.S. patent application 20190085226 (applicant Cold Chain Technologies Inc., Franklin, Mass.):

"Gel including a phase-change material and a gelling agent. In one embodiment, the phase-change material may be n-tetradecane, n-hexadecane or mixtures thereof. The gelling agent may be a high molecular weight styrene-ethylene-butylene-styrene (SEBS) triblock copolymer with a styrene:rubber ratio of about 30:70 to 33:67% by weight. To form the gel, the phase-change material and the gelling agent may be mixed at an elevated temperature relative to room temperature to partially, but not completely, dissolve the gelling agent. The mixture may then be cooled to room temperature. Alternatively, the phase-change material and the gelling agent may be mixed at room temperature, and the mixture may then be heated to form a viscoelastic liquid, which is then cooled to room temperature. The invention is also directed at a method of preparing the gel, a thermal exchange implement including the gel, and a method of preparing the thermal exchange implement."

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20190085226.pdf

U.S. patent application 20190089027 (applicant Dell Products L.P., Round Rock, Texas):

"A multilayer thermal laminate with aerogel is used for a battery cell enclosure to improve thermal properties and to reduce thermal inhomogeneity in the form of localized hotspots that exceed a desired rated temperature, thereby enabling a more compact design within rated thermal design limits for a given electrical performance. ... [The third layer of the laminate] serves as a thermal storage medium and may accordingly be comprised of a phase change material, such as a wax. The phase change material may be selected to have a desired melting temperature range, such as between 30 C and 70 C, between 45 C and 65 C, or between 40 C and 60 C, in given implementations, among other possible melting temperature ranges."

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20190089027.pdf

U.S. patent application 20190086158 (inventor James Hirschfeld, Delray Beach, Fla.):

"A removable cooling sticker secured to the surface of a cellular telephone for extraction of heat from the cellular telephone. The cooling sticker is thin and sized to be conveniently carried. [Using phase change material as the active heat extraction material,] the cooling sticker is adhered to the cellular telephone at its hot spot for maximum efficiency. An optional feature employs thermal strips that indicate when the electronic device is exceeding a temperature threshold sticker."

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20190086158.pdf

• Axiom Exergy has announced a partnership with Leap, a technology company that serves as an aggregator of flexible power loads in California. Axiom says the arrangement will unlock grid services revenue for its customers, including three Whole Foods Market facilities in Northern California.

Axiom's "Refrigeration Battery" system is designed to reduce a supermarket's peak power use by up to 40 percent and provide backup cooling during power outages. It uses the excess capacity of existing refrigeration systems to "store cooling" at night by freezing tanks of salt water.  

"Axiom Exergy is excited to announce that Whole Foods has connected three of their buildings to our platform, which will serve as our first Virtual Power Plant," Axiom CEO Amrit Robbins wrote in a LinkedIn post Friday. "Axiom’s platform will intelligently manage 340 kW of dispatchable load across these facilities in order to generate more value for Whole Foods and to help stabilize California’s electricity grid."

• Sonoco ThermoSafe has announced a global partnership agreement with Cargolux for the leasing of the PharmaPort 360 temperature-controlled bulk shipping container. The agreement enables pharmaceutical shippers to lease PharmaPort 360 containers directly from the all-cargo airline based in Luxembourg.

• On LinkedIn this week, Ice Energy posted an update on its 5 MW contract with Riverside Public Utilities in California: "We are working to install 9 Ice Bear thermal #energystorage batteries and 13 rooftop units with Inland Mechanical Services Inc. at a car dealership in Riverside."

• A high-temperature thermal energy storage system inaugurated in Denmark this week stores heat in stones. The test system uses surplus wind power to generate hot air, which heats up small stones in an insulated container to 600 degrees. The stored heat is used to generate electricity when the wind doesn't blow. The system was developed by the energy company Seas-NVE, in collaboration with DTU Energy, Aarhus University Geoscience, Danish Energy, Energinet.dk and Rockwool.

• Alexium International CEO Bob Brookins was among the presenters at the International Conference on Textile Coating and Laminating in Berlin earlier this month. His topic: "Advanced applications of phase change materials."

• The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is investigating whether Germany’s coal plants can be refitted to serve as thermal energy storage sites. "The research body, which has a track record in concentrated solar power (CSP) development, is planning a pilot that will involve ripping out the boiler from an old coal plant and replacing it with a molten salt thermal storage tank that will be heated using excess renewable energy," Greentech Media reports. "If the concept works, then advocates say it could help safeguard coal generation jobs while giving Germany tens of gigawatts of storage capacity for renewable energy load-shifting on the German grid." DLR says it is preparing a commercial-scale pilot in association with an unnamed German utility.

Sunamp Ltd. of Scotland has signed a memo of understanding with a Chinese manufacturer to develop a heat pump water heater for the residential market.

The new technology will combine heat pumps made by Jiangsu Gomon Renewable Energy Development Co. and Sunamp's UniQ heat batteries, which use a salt-based phase change material to store excess energy generated by solar PV systems. The stored energy is released on demand to provide heat and hot water.

The two companies signed the agreement last week at the ISH trade fair in Frankfurt. The agreement sets the terms for manufacturing and marketing the product in China and worldwide. Sunamp says product testing is already underway.

“Sunamp aims to displace as many water tanks as possible with UniQ heat batteries," said Maurizio Zaglio, Sunamp's international business development manager. "The fact that one of the largest manufacturers of water tanks in the world has decided to develop a new product with us is an important milestone for Sunamp."

In a presentation at ISH, Zaglio put it more plainly: "We are not here to complement hot water tanks - we are here to replace them!"

The deal is Sunamp's second with a major Chinese manufacturer in the past four months. In November, the company signed an agreement with Trina Solar to develop an integrated solution combining Sunamp heat batteries now made in Scotland with heat pumps manufactured at Trina's new factory in Changzhou, China.

https://www.insider.co.uk/news/heat-storage-battery-pioneer-sunamp-14121831