High polyethylene glycol loaded, supported and stabilized shape phase change material based on zirconium based porous metal supramolecular gel

Shape-stabilized phase change materials (PCMs) are widely used in thermal energy storage because of their shape stability, excellent PCM load capacity and energy storage performance. Herein, a straightforward strategy was adopted to design and synthesize zirconium based three-dimensional porous metal supramolecular gel (MSG) as support material in PCM. The porous support material exhibits strong hydrogen-bond interactions with polyethylene glycol (PEG) molecules, maintaining the shape stability of the PEG matrix even at 120 °C. Meantime, the load capacity and energy storage capacity of the prepared composite PCM reached an astonishing 99.2 wt% and 95.5 %, respectively. In addition, after 30 heating/cooling cycles, the phase-change composite showed high durability. Latent heat and phase transition temperature did not change significantly.