Study on Prediction of Latent Heat Stability of Carbon Foam/Paraffin Composite Phase Change Material

Phase change material (PCM) is the main composite of the PCM based heat sink, whose thermal management performance is significantly based on the latent heat stability of the PCM. An experiment was conducted for investigating the heat stability of the graphite/paraffin composite based PCM. The experiment is an aging test, which contains 2 months high temperature storage and 100 cycles of melting and solidification. The equivalent enthalpy method was applied to analyze the test data, which manifested that the effective latent heat of PCM declines obviously with the test times increasing. The differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) results show that the latent heat would drop by 10.7% after 2 rounds test. By applying the kinetic model, the degradation of the equivalent latent heat seems to match the first-order dynamic behavior well, which manifests that the latent heat half-life of the composite PCM is about 2 years.