Photo-triggered hierarchical porous carbon based composite phase change materials with superior thermal energy conversion capacity

The insensitivity of organic phase change materials to light greatly limits the application of solar-thermal conversion. In the present work, a novel self-sacrificing template method was developed to prepare a hierarchical porous carbon (HPC) material with large specific surface area using easily available starting materials of sucrose and sodium bicarbonate. Organic phase change material of paraffin wax (PW) was consequently incorporated into the PC to obtain a shape-stabilized composite phase change material (CPCM) with superior solar-thermal conversion ability. The prepared CPCM exhibits superior thermal performance, shape stability, cycle stability and sunlight absorbing ability. Also, the CPCM has a rather stable phase change enthalpy of about 152 J/g even after 1000 heating-cooling cycles. The solar-thermal conversion efficiency of CPCM is found to be as high as 89%. This work might provide a facile low-cost method for designing and synthesizing shape-stabilized phase change materials based on porou...