Porous geopolymer as a possible template for a phase change material

Abstract

Nowadays, the increase in energy demand has resulted in exhaustion of energy resources, climate change, and environmental pollution. A way to approach this issue and improve the environment is by reducing the consumption of energy in buildings, either by the employment of new materials or by using unified energy storage systems. Phase Change Materials (PCM's) which can be used to store thermal energy as latent heat, can be an alternative to reduce the consumption of energy in either houses or buildings. The key use in this alternative is the segregation of the PCM from the supporting material that may result in a damage to the human health of inhabitants. In the present paper, a non-toxic metakaolinite-based geopolymer was studied as an alternative to imbed dodecanol by using Hexadecyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) as a coupling agent and a surface treatment with Tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) to prevent segregation was assessed. Dodecanol-geopolymer samples were characterized by FT-IR, XRD and SEM; and energy storage and phase change temperature were measured by DSC.Finally, dodecanol load capacity was calculated. The effectiveness of CTAB as a coupling agent between the dodecanol and the geopolymer was showed while the surface treatment increases the load capacity of the dodecanol-geopolymer system studied.