Preparation of microencapsulated phase change materials based on expanded polystyrene foam wastes

Abstract

The ‘white pollution’ caused by expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam wastes has become a difficult problem in the world. In this study, the wasted EPS foam material was reused to prepare phase change material (PCM) in order to reduce its pollution to the environment. The phase separation method was adopted to build microencapsulated PCM and the paraffin wax was used as core material in this work. Their results showed that the impurities contained in polystyrene foam wastes almost had no impact on the samples. The particles had continuous surface and regular spherical structure. Compared to other PCMs, the latent heat of the PCM in this study is significantly increased, which is about 72.52 J/g. As mentioned above, the material prepared in this work can be considered as a potential phase change material.