Additive manufacturing to enable high performance salt-hydrate based thermal energy storage products

Phase change materials (PCMs) store large amounts of latent heat during phase transitions and, therefore, are used as thermal energy storage (TES) materials in a variety of applications. Applications of TES in buildings are of particular interest for their potential to increase a building’s thermal mass and provide flexibility to time‐shift demand for grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs). Moreover, PCMs can be used to reduce cooling loads in datacenters/telecom applications and to improve the efficiency of clean energy technologies such as electric batteries. Salt hydrates are one of the most promising PCM materials with high energy density and lower cost, but are prone to significant subcooling effects, phase segregation, cycling hysteresis, and corrosiveness. TCPoly will collaborate with NREL and PCS to 3D print PCM products integrated with TCPoly’s thermally conductive polymers. Leveraging thermally conductive polymers and additive manufacturing to fabricate TES products provides an opportunity to overcome Salt-hydrate PCM limitations while also enabling unmatched control over geometry. Therefore, our solution allows for optimization of PCM/thermally conductive matrix structure and heat exchanger geometry for controlled charge and discharge characteristics, high efficiency, and reduced system costs.