Cellulose foams as scalable templates for phase change materials

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Access rights

openAccess
publishedVersion

URL

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2023-12-10

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

10

Series

Journal of Energy Storage, Volume 73, pp. 1-10

Abstract

Cellulose foams produced by wet-templating fibers and surfactants offer an unlimited creative space for the design of green functional materials with a wide range of energy-related applications. Aiming to reduce plastic pollution, cellulose foams promise to replace plastic foams after tailoring physical functionalities into their structures. Here, this work demonstrates that cellulose foams made of methylcellulose and cellulose fibers can exhibit a solid–liquid phase change functionality by adding a phase change material (PCM) during the foam-forming process. The resulting foam composites, termed cellulose phase change foams (PCFs), exhibit a tenth of cellulose's density (134.7 kg m−3) yet a high Young's modulus (0.42MPa). They are also dimensionally stable over a wide range of temperatures while absorbing up to 108 kJ kg−1 as latent heat when the PCM confined to the foam experiences a solid-to-liquid transition at ∼60 °C, and releasing 108 kJ kg−1 as latent heat when changing from liquid to solid at ∼40 °C. Such phase change transition opens up broad applications for the PCFs as thermal insulators. For example, by further tuning the transition temperature, the PCFs can exploit their phase change and reduce the heat flow rate through their radial direction at specified temperatures. This article showcases the versatility of the foam-forming process of cellulose to accommodate physical functionalities in materials with complex architectures. Furthermore, thanks to the advances in cellulose foam-forming, such foams are recyclable, industrially scalable, and can be exploited as heat storage materials.

Description

Funding Information: M. Alava and J. Koivisto acknowledge support from FinnCERES flagship [ 151830423 ] and Business Finland [ 211835 ]. M. Alava, T. Mäkinen and I. Y. Miranda-Valdez acknowledge support from Business Finland [ 211909 ]. M. R. Yazdani acknowledges financial support from the Academy of Finland [ 343192 ]. I. Y. Miranda-Valdez acknowledges financial support from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture via its Finland Fellowship scholarship program. The funding sources had no role in any activity related to this manuscript. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s)

Keywords

Cellulose foam, Energy storage material, Machine learning, Phase change material, Polyethylene glycol

Other note

Citation

Miranda-Valdez, I Y, Yazdani, M R, Mäkinen, T, Coffeng, S, Viitanen, L, Koivisto, J & Alava, M J 2023, ' Cellulose foams as scalable templates for phase change materials ', Journal of Energy Storage, vol. 73, 109036, pp. 1-10 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2023.109036