Ground tire rubber/activated carbon/expanded graphite aerogels and foams as support material for the preparation of polyethylene glycol composite phase change materials for thermal energy storage applications

Abstract

The 3 “Rs” of trash management, reduce, reuse, and recycle, lead to a theoretical topic. Techniques for waste management should reprocess these waste products into new functional materials. In the area of thermal energy storage, phase change material (PCM) is another hot topic due to its high latent heat. Unfortunately, it is constrained by issues such as simple leakage and poor heat conductivity. Herein, we integrate waste material and phase change material by preparing composite phase change material in which aerogels and foams serve as 3D support matrices that were made using ground tire rubber, activated carbon and expanded graphite additives to successfully overcome the aforementioned disadvantages of phase change material via Porogen leaching and freeze drying techniques. Experiment findings demonstrated that the CPCM has excellent shape stability. TAA5 and TAE5 had the highest melting enthalpies, at 146.21 and 148.23 J/g respectively. After 500 thermal test cycles and 25 photothermal test cycles, the prepared CPCMs exhibit strong thermal reliability as evidenced by a small decrease in enthalpy value. In addition, the thermal conductivity of TAE15 was remarkable at 1.18 W/(mK), which was 5.36 times greater than that of PEG 0.22 W/(mK). The use of AC and EG as additives boosted TAE15's photothermal conversion efficiency to 93 %. Hence, CPCMs offer a significant deal of potential in fields such as thermal energy storage, solar energy, and building energy savings.