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Research Article | Online first | Published: 16 May 2024

Significant enhancement in local thermal conductivity of erythritol at interface with nanoparticles due to their interaction

Show Author's Information Ning Cao1,  Yanhui Feng1( ),  Kening Yan1,  Zihan Liu1,  Jiawei Wan2( ),  Lin Qiu1( )
School of Energy and Environmental Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China
State Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Key Laboratory of Biopharmaceutical Preparation and Delivery, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
Keywords:
phase change materials, thermal conductivity, interaction energy, scanning thermal microscopy, reduced Young’s modulus, phonon participation ratio
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Nanoparticles
Cite this article:
Cao N, Feng Y, Yan K, et al. Significant enhancement in local thermal conductivity of erythritol at interface with nanoparticles due to their interaction. Nano Research, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-024-6690-6
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Abstract Full text Electronic supplementary material About this article

When nano-fillers are used to enhance the thermal conductivity of organic phase change materials (PCMs), the naturally formed interface is considered to hinder thermal transport of the composite PCMs. However, the effect of the interface on the thermal properties of surrounding PCM has not been fully studied. In this paper, three composite PCMs (Ery@SiC, Ery@SiO2 and Ery@Si3N4) were prepared by melt-blending method. The local thermal conductivity and reduced Young’s modulus (E*) of the erythritol at the interface and far away from the interface in the composite PCMs were simultaneously measured by scanning thermal microscopy (SThM). The results revealed significant enhancement in local thermal conductivity of erythritol at the interface and its obvious positive correlation with E*. For different composite PCMs, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations suggested that the increase in intrinsic thermal conductivity and E* of erythritol is attributed to the increase in interaction energy between erythritol and nanoparticles, as more erythritol phonon vibrations transform from localized mode to delocalized mode and erythritol has a higher density at the interface. These findings will provide new ideas for the design of PCM for energy storage.


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Electronic supplementary material
About this article

Significant enhancement in local thermal conductivity of erythritol at interface with nanoparticles due to their interaction

Show Author's information Ning Cao1, Yanhui Feng1( ), Kening Yan1, Zihan Liu1, Jiawei Wan2( ), Lin Qiu1( )
School of Energy and Environmental Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China
State Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Key Laboratory of Biopharmaceutical Preparation and Delivery, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

Abstract

When nano-fillers are used to enhance the thermal conductivity of organic phase change materials (PCMs), the naturally formed interface is considered to hinder thermal transport of the composite PCMs. However, the effect of the interface on the thermal properties of surrounding PCM has not been fully studied. In this paper, three composite PCMs (Ery@SiC, Ery@SiO2 and Ery@Si3N4) were prepared by melt-blending method. The local thermal conductivity and reduced Young’s modulus (E*) of the erythritol at the interface and far away from the interface in the composite PCMs were simultaneously measured by scanning thermal microscopy (SThM). The results revealed significant enhancement in local thermal conductivity of erythritol at the interface and its obvious positive correlation with E*. For different composite PCMs, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations suggested that the increase in intrinsic thermal conductivity and E* of erythritol is attributed to the increase in interaction energy between erythritol and nanoparticles, as more erythritol phonon vibrations transform from localized mode to delocalized mode and erythritol has a higher density at the interface. These findings will provide new ideas for the design of PCM for energy storage.

Keywords: phase change materials, thermal conductivity, interaction energy, scanning thermal microscopy, reduced Young’s modulus, phonon participation ratio

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Publication history
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Acknowledgements

Publication history

Received: 26 March 2024
Revised: 07 April 2024
Accepted: 07 April 2024
Published: 16 May 2024

Copyright

© Tsinghua University Press 2024

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2023YFF0612804), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 52222602, 52236006, and 22293043), Beijing Nova Program (No. 20220484170), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. FRF-TP-22-001C1 and FRF-EYIT-23-05), Foundation of the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of CAS (No. 2020048), and IPE Project for Frontier Basic Research (No. QYJC-2023-08).

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