Boron Nitride-Doped Inorganic Hydrated Salt Gels Demonstrating Superior Thermal Energy Storage and Wearability Toward High-Performance Personal Thermal Management
Yingying Luo, Liqing Zou, Junpeng Qiao, Jiaming Zhang, Kai Liu, Hongjiao Wu, Pengcheng Lin, Ying Chen
Abstract
Realizing the person thermal management (PTM) toward human body and its local environment is emerging as a research hotspot. Sodium sulfate decahydrate (SSD) possessing reversible thermal energy absorption, storage, and release around the human body temperature provides a promising solution for PTM and thermal comfort. However, developing SSD-based functional materials with superior thermophysical properties and wearability to enable efficient PTM still remains a huge challenge. Herein, a strategy of ionic cross-linking, chemical cross-linking, and boron nitride (BN) doping is developed to manufacture the high-performance hybrid SSD gels. The supercooling degree of the BN@SSD gels can be reduced to 0 °C. The thermal conductivity (1.2668 W m–1 K–1) of the BN@SSD gels can be increased by 63.14%. The BN@SSD gels present a large thermal energy storage capacity of 132.52 J g–1. The BN@SSD gels demonstrate excellent form stability to confine the liquid SSD and high cyclic stability of 200 cycles. Furthermore, The BN@SSD gels also possess superior wearability in terms of high flexibility, high self-repairing efficiency, and high cost effectiveness (5.53 × 10–3 ¥ g–1). Owing to the various merits of the synergistic enhancement effect, the BN@SSD gels are effectively utilized in wearable PTM to generate thermal comfort for the human body. The multifunctional thermal energy storage gels offer a promising route to the highly efficient application of PCMs in next-generation PTM.