Researchers world-wide are investigating thermal energy storage, especially phase change materials, for their substantial benefits in improving energy efficiency, sustaining thermal comfort in buildings and contributing to the reduction of environmental pollution. Residential buildings and commercial constructions, being dependent on heating and cooling systems, are subjected to the utilization of PCM technology through several applications. The current study presents a state-of-the-art review that covers recent literature on thermal energy storage systems utilizing PCMs for buildings. The reviewed applications are heating and hybrid applications, that are categorized as passive and active systems. A summary of the PCMs used, applications, thermo-physical properties and incorporation methods are presented as well. The study emphasizes the promising effectiveness of PCM in building heating applications, and highlights the significance of PCM system hybridization. The study shows that experimental investigations on commercial constructions, and hybrid systems development and optimization, are still required. Finally, possible combinations of active and passive heating applications with their auspicious benefits in terms of energy efficiency augmentation, are recommended.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02965149/document

A review on phase change materials for thermal energy storage in buildings: Heating and hybrid applications

Computer modelling and experimental investigation of phase change hysteresis of PCMs: The state-of-the-art review

Modeling hysteresis in the phase transition of industrial-grade solid/liquid PCM for thermal energy storages

Supercooling is a natural phenomenon that keeps a phase change material (PCM) in its liquid state at a temperature lower than its solidification temperature. In the field of thermal energy storage systems, entering in supercooled state is generally considered as a drawback, since it prevents the release of the latent heat. Conversely, when dealing with plants, animals or preservation processes, supercooling protects organs, tissues or blood from solidification that leads to damage or to death. This paper first reviews the most important applications and cases in which supercooling can take place and dramatically change the performance. Second, the paper discusses the factors affecting the occurrence and the degree of supercooling, such as cooling rate, PCM container characteristics, PCM thermal history, use of additives, etc. The paper includes a supercooling modeling section, which presents the main mathematical and numerical methods used to solve the challenges encountered by researchers. This review shows that to experimentally foster or reduce supercooling, most researchers tend to use similar methods such as controlling the cooling rate, changing container's characteristics or adding additives. The main challenge in supercooling modeling being its unstable and probabilistic nature, most authors tend to perform experimental measurements to obtain some key parameters, notably the supercooling degree, prior to the modeling. This strategy restricts the validity of the models to applications having the same conditions as the experiments. Nevertheless, this review offers the guidelines to select the appropriate experimental parameters and modeling strategies, depending on the specific and practical objectives of each application. 

Supercooling of phase change materials: A review

Technical-grade and mixed solid/liquid phase change materials (PCM) typically melt and solidify over a temperature range, sometimes exhibiting thermal hysteresis. Three phenomenological phase trans...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19401493.2019.1657953

Yosef Korin

Papers

A novel multi-dimensional model for solidification process with supercooling