Polymer Encapsulation Strategy toward 3D Printable, Sustainable, and Reliable Form-Stable Phase Change Materials for Advanced Thermal Energy Storage

Form-stable phase change materials (PCMs) have garnered tremendous attention in thermal energy storage (TES) owing to their remarkable latent heat. However, the integration of intelligent manufacturing, recycling, and optimized multifunction is considered not feasible for form-stable PCMs due to the restriction of encapsulation technology. Here, an excellent polymer encapsulation strategy is proposed to prepare 3D printable, sustainable, and reliable form-stable PCMs (SiPCM-x), which are universal for petroleum-based and biobased long alkyl compounds. SiPCM-x have top-class latent heat, and the phase-change temperatures are tunable from body temperature to high temperature. The in situ formative bottlebrush phase-change polysiloxane networks are used as supporting materials, and the encapsulation mechanism is clarified. Sirbw-250 can be degraded and re-encapsulated to achieve recycling. Besides, Sirbw-250 is fabricated as the customer-designed objects with shape-changing behavior via 3D printing. By introducing the metal foams and nano-coatings, the resulting phase-change composites simultaneously exhibit excellent superhydrophobicity, mechanical properties, thermal conductivity, electromagnetic interference shielding behavior, and solar-, electric-, and magnetic-to-thermal energy conversion ability. Besides, S-Ni-SiPCM-250 can be applied in the wearable functional devices and movable solar-thermal charging. This strategy will lead to huge renovation in the TES field and provide an efficient guideline for designing advanced form-stable PCMs.