Speaker
Description
Modern cultural and governmental attitudes towards sustainability are progressing industry towards a circular economy model. Here, the reuse, recycling and remanufacturing of products prolongs the useful lifetime of materials. Metallic scrap, generated during conventional manufacture and at the end of life of metallic components, is often recycled into a raw product suitable for the production of new components. The recycling process, however, may introduce impurities in such magnitude as to critically degrade the alloy components mechanical properties. Where this is the case, the scrap may find reuse as a metallic Phase Change Material (mPCM) for thermal energy storage.
Aluminium and copper alloys are among the metals with the highest recovery rates and show promise as mPCM constituents due to their high energy and power density relative to organic and salt-based materials. Convenient melting temperatures for many applications are found in eutectic transformations in systems involving these elements. Synthesis of specific compositions may be optimally achieved by mixing different scrap sources according to the composition range from the existing DIN standards.
Several aluminium and copper binary eutectic compositions were identified as recycled latent heat storage materials through a survey of phase equilibria. These were synthesised and characterised to observe how the purity of the recycled metals impacts the thermophysical properties including melting temperature, heat of fusion, heat capacity and thermal diffusivity. Characterisation was performed in a Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) to determine the melting temperature, heat of fusion and heat capacity of the recycled alloys. A Light Flash Apparatus (LFA) was used to determine the thermal diffusivity. The identification, synthesis method and determined properties sufficient for engineering evaluation will be presented. An appraisal of the suitability of recycled scrap sources in mPCMs will be given.
| Speaker Country | Germany |
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