Highly thermal conductive Boron Nitride/Polyrotaxane encapsulated PEG-based phase change materials.

Abstract

In this work, we tried to overcome the typical limitations of phase change materials (PCMs), namely, leakage and low thermal conductivity. To realize the leakage proof PCM, a polyrotaxane (PLR) was selected as a support material to encapsulate Polyethylene glycol (PEG) 1 k. Subsequently, different contents of Boron Nitride (BN) were blended to enhance the thermal conductivity of PLR/PEG matrix. The PCMs created in this work achieves a high thermal performance with enthalpy values (91.2–123.5 J/g) and high flexibility and shows a great shape stability and no leakage and shape change during its phase transition. Due to the action of BN as a multifunctional filler, the PCMs also experienced an increase of 186.7% to 806.7% in thermal conductivity values, and enhanced flame retardancy (with decrease of 16.6% for pHRR and 25.5% for THR). These improvements solve the main problems of organic PCMs thus making PLR-PEG-BN based materials a good candidate to be used as thermal energy storage material in industrial applications. For the exact application cases, it showed obvious Peak Shaving and Valley Filling for thermoelectric generator and heat regulation for the smart phone.