An Overview of the State of the Art and Challenges in the Use of Gelling and Thickening Agents to Create Stable Thermal Energy Storage Materials

Building cooling and heating, solar-powered energy production, recovery, other energy-consuming industries have all seen an increase in the use of cold/hot latent thermal storage (LH-TES). Through LH-TES that uses phase-change materials (PCMs) as a medium helps to close supply demand gap raises possibility savings. However, stability, thermal, physical, chemical properties PCM play major role how effectively it can be used. In recent years, adding gelling thickening agents (GTAs) has gained popularity apart from nanoparticles (NPs) nucleating triggers (NTs), particularly for creation stable PCMs. Therefore, current work’s goal is provide overview GTAs are used process developing reliable PCMs TES applications. It been found using not only increased stability but also decreased sedimentation, leakage, supercooling degree (SCD). was noted addition GTA with weight percentage 2–15% resulted excellent negligible leakage rate heat reduced by 3.6–35% after 200 cycles. Furthermore, solar-thermal building heating systems medium-temperature range (21–61 °C) were mostly studied their performance GTAs, no study cool application reported. Most works inorganic components few reports available paraffin. blending due decrease conductivity, heat, rise viscosity. Further, NTs NPs small amounts seeded into PCM-GTA eradicating SCD enhanced TC accelerated transfer.