Heat-Transfer Properties of Additively Manufactured Aluminum Lattice Structures in Combination with Phase Change Material

TL;DR

This paper explores how aluminum lattice structures can improve heat transfer in phase change materials for better energy storage.

Contribution

The study introduces additively manufactured aluminum lattices combined with phase change materials to enhance thermal conductivity.

Findings

The thermal conductivity of the aluminum lattices ranged from 3 W/(m·K) to 130 W/(m·K).

Simulations matched well with experimental results, validating the approach.

Varying cell size and strut diameter affected thermal performance.

Abstract

Compared to sensible heat storage, latent heat storage provides higher energy density due to the enthalpy difference of the storage medium undergoing a phase change. However, the heat storage capability of phase change materials is opposed by low thermal conductivity. To enable sufficient heat transfer within a latent heat storage unit, phase change materials can be used in combination with a metallic matrix. One approach is the infiltration of phase change materials into additively manufactured metallic lattice structures. In this work, the fabrication of aluminum lattice structures through laser powder bed fusion is described. During fabrication, the cell size and the strut diameter were varied to obtain specimens of different geometries. To obtain the thermal conductivity of the fabricated lattices, measurements were conducted based on the transient plane source method. Additionally, finite element simulations were carried out to evaluate the effect of fabrication and measurement uncertainties. The thermal conductivity of the fabricated lattices was found to be between 3 W/(m·K) and 130 W/(m·K). The numerically and analytically performed calculations provide good estimations of the experimentally obtained data.

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