Fabrication and thermal conductivity improvement of novel composite adsorbents adding with nanoparticles

Abstract

Thermal conductivity is one of key parameters of adsorbents, which will affect the overall system performance of adsorption chiller. To improve adsorbent’s thermal conductivity is always one of research focuses in chemisorption field. A new chemical composite adsorbent is fabricated by adding carbon coated metal(Aluminum and Nickel) nanoparticles with three different addition amounts into the mixture of chloride salts and natural expanded graphite aiming to improve the thermal conductivity. The preparation processes and its thermal conductivity of this novel composite adsorbent are reported and summarized. Experimental results indicate that the nanoparticles are homogenously dispersed in the composite adsorbent by applying the reported preparation processes. The thermal conductivity of the composite adsorbent can averagely enlarge by 20% when the weight ratio of the added nanoparticles is 10 wt%. Moreover, carbon coated aluminum nanoparticles exhibit more effective enlargement in thermal conductivity than nickel nanoparticles. As for the composite adsorbent of CaCl2-NEG, there is a big reinforcement from 30% to 50% for Al@C nanoparticles, however only 10% in maximum caused by Ni@C nanoparticles. The proposed research provides a methodology to design and prepare thermal conductive chemical composite adsorbent.