High polyethylene glycol loaded, supported and stabilized shape phase change material based on zirconium based porous metal supramolecular gel

Shape-stabilized phase change materials (PCMs) are widely used in thermal energy storage because of their shape stability, excellent PCM load capacity and energy storage performance. Herein, a straightforward strategy was adopted to design and synthesize zirconium based three-dimensional porous metal supramolecular gel (MSG) as support material in PCM. The porous support material exhibits strong hydrogen-bond interactions with polyethylene glycol (PEG) molecules, maintaining the shape stability of the PEG matrix even at 120 C. Meantime, the load capacity and energy storage capacity of the prepared composite PCM reached an astonishing 99.2 wt% and 95.5 %, respectively. In addition, after 30 heating/cooling cycles, the phase-change composite showed high durability. Latent heat and phase transition temperature did not change significantly.