Thermal conductivity enhancement of lauric acid phase change nanocomposite with graphene nanoplatelets

Abstract

In this work, we prepared lauric acid based phase change nanocomposites with chemically functionalized graphene nanoplatelets and measured its thermal conductivity using transient hot wire method. We show that inclusion of graphene nanoplatelets increases the thermal conductivity of phase change material by 230% at a loading of 1 vol%. Comparing the experimental results with the model calculations based on the effective medium theory suggests that graphene based nanocomposites outperforms those with carbon nanotubes or metal nanoparticles reported in the literature. High thermal conductivity, high aspect ratio and low thermal interface resistance at the graphene – host matrix interface makes it the most suitable nano filler candidate to enhance the thermal conductivity of low conductive materials. Differential scanning calorimetry study of the nanocomposites show that the phase change enthalpy and the melting temperature remains similar to that of pristine material, which makes graphene a promising candidate for thermal energy storage applications.