Thermophysical, rheological and dielectric behaviour of stable carbon black dispersions in PEG200

Abstract

Phase change materials can store or release large amounts of energy during phase change. An increasing number of authors are studying the influence of the dispersion of nanometric particles on these materials. This article presents the design and experimental characterization of temporal stability, thermal conductivity, isobaric heat capacity, phase change transitions, rheological behaviour, and dielectric properties of nano-enhanced phase change materials based on carbon black (CB) dispersions in polyethylene glycol (PEG200) by using polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as surfactant. We studied the temporal stability of carbon black nanoparticles dispersed in PEG200 using dynamic light scattering and spectrophotometry techniques. All the samples showed good temporal stability, since the measurements of the hydrodynamic size of the nanoparticles are practically constant over time and the wavelength observed by UV–vis shows a small variation of around 4% for static conditions. We observed small changes in thermal conductivity and isobaric heat capacity. Nevertheless, the thermograms evidence how the latent heat clearly increases with the load of carbon black nanoparticles up to four times that of the PEG200. The viscosity studies do not show variation with shear rate, indicating a Newtonian behaviour, excluding the 2.0 wt% CB/PVP + PEG200 nanofluid. Additionally, we noticed frequency dependent and independent regions for permittivity.