Thermophysical properties of n-hexadecane: Combined Molecular Dynamics and experimental investigations

TL;DR

This study combines molecular dynamics simulations and experimental measurements to investigate the thermophysical properties of n-hexadecane across different temperature regimes, enhancing understanding of phase change materials for heat storage.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of molecular dynamics simulations with experimental data for n-hexadecane's thermal and rheological properties, advancing microscopic understanding of PCMs.

Findings

Good agreement between simulations and experiments

Thermal conductivity and viscosity vary with temperature

Insights into microscopic mechanisms of heat storage materials

Abstract

Investigating properties of phase change materials (PCMs) is an important issue due to their extensive use in heat storage systems and thermal regulation devices. Improvement of the efficiency of such systems should be based on a better knowledge of the microscopic mechanisms governing the thermal and rheological characteristics of PCMs. This may be accomplished by the use of molecular simulations of the aforementioned quantities and their linkage with macroscale investigations. In this work, we studied thermophysical properties of $n$-hexadecane for different temperatures regimes using molecular dynamics (MD) and carry out several experimental measurements. Particularly, we focused on the evaluation of various rheological and thermal properties such as thermal conductivity, $\kappa$, viscosity, $\eta$, diffusion coefficient, $D$, and heat capacities $C_p$ and $C_v$. Special attention was paid to the comparison of the results of simulations with experimental ones.