Due to the adsorption performance of porous metal foam structure

a salt hydrate/metal foam composite phase change material(PCM)was prepared by using barium hydroxide octahydrate(Ba(OH)2·8H2O)as latent heat storage PCM and copper foams as supporting matrix.The thermal properties of Ba(OH)2·8H2O were measured by differential scanning calorimetry after a number of repeated thermal cycles.As the number of thermal cycles increases

the phase change temperature of Ba(OH)2·8H2O is almost constant and the latent heat of fusion decreases slightly

which implies that Ba(OH)2·8H2O has a good thermal stability.An experimental setup was built to study the heat transfer performance of Ba(OH)2·8H2O with/without copper foams.The results show that the high porosity metal foam not only enhances the heat transfer rate of Ba(OH)2·8H2O within thermal storage units

but also reduces the supercooling of PCM effectively.The supercooling of salt hydrates can be improved significantly by using larger pores per inch(PPI)metal foams.