IL-PCM - Ionic Liquid PCM for smart building applications

Smart buildings and the energy strategy 2050 are at the origin of an important demand for compact and demand-oriented thermal storage. One solution to meet these requirements is the use of new Phase Change Materials (PCM)s with on-demand activation and intelligent control of the heat & cold storage, charge and discharge processes. This means that new and sustainable PCM must be developed together with a measurement system of their capacity and storage level.

Chemicals used today as PCMs are either from fossil resources (paraffin’s), hydrated salts or fatty acids. The current problems and challenges of these materials are costs, sustainability, corrosion, toxicity, fusion-solidification temperature, hysteresis, material purity, small temperature conductivity, thermal cycling stability, and packaging. There is also only a modest number of manufacturers and commercial products.

In this project, Prof. Roger Marti and his team prepared novel sustainable phase change materials (PCM) based on ionic liquids (IL) from natural & renewable sources. ILs are organic salts with melting temperature typically below 100 °C. The advantage of ILs is the endless number of cation/anion combinations that allows synthesizing IL for specific applications. The team from ChemTech and ENERGY also developed a lab-scale prototype for testing and characterization of these ILs. Our newly developed ionic liquids are more efficient at absorbing energy than the common commercial PCM. This is some promising insight into the use of ionic liquids in the application of energy storage.

This project offers a new opportunity for the industry to construct and build more energy-efficient buildings, resulting in CO2 savings.