Preparation and thermal property analysis of Wood's alloy/expanded graphite composite as highly conductive form-stable phase change material for electronic thermal management

This paper reported a Wood's alloy/expanded graphite (EG) composite phase change material (PCM) with high thermal conductivity and good form-stability. In this composite PCM, Wood's alloy served as heat storage medium and EG acted as both heat transfer promoter and packaging material. The thermal properties of this composite PCM were investigated by means of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and transient plane source (TPS) method. The results showed that the phase change temperature of the composite was about 70.5 °C. The sensible and latent heat storage densities as well as thermal conductivity were influenced by the mass percentage of Wood's alloy and the composite's compacting density. The latent heat storage density and thermal conductivity could reach up to 113.1 J·cm−3 and 65.0 W·m−1·K−1. Appearance observation of the composite revealed that increasing the mass percentage of the alloy and decreasing the compacting density could help to keep the composite form-stable. These findings approved the potential of the Wood's alloy/EG composite for use in thermal management of high power electronic devices.