Many inorganic phase change materials, and particularly salt hydrates, show strong subcooling, which has negative effects on their performance as heat or cold storage materials. In this work, a suggested reduction of subcooling by ultrasonic treatment (“sononucleation”) was investigated. The nucleation temperature as function of pressure was experimentally quantified up to 800MPa for three salt hydrates. Various experiments showed that sononucleation is an effective, robust and reliable technique for solidifying water, but ineffective for solidifying salt hydrates. Contrary to what is proposed in literature, it is shown that peak pressures during cavitation in the ultrasonic field cannot be made responsible for sononucleation. Instead, sononucleation could be explained by a surface mechanism, which is effective in pure substances or solutions, but not in salt hydrates.
«
Many inorganic phase change materials, and particularly salt hydrates, show strong subcooling, which has negative effects on their performance as heat or cold storage materials. In this work, a suggested reduction of subcooling by ultrasonic treatment (“sononucleation”) was investigated. The nucleation temperature as function of pressure was experimentally quantified up to 800MPa for three salt hydrates. Various experiments showed that sononucleation is an effective, robust and reliable techniqu...
»