Preparation and Properties of Thermal Management Materials for Electronic Devices Using Stearic Acid/Expanded Graphite Composite Phase Change Material with Enhanced Thermal Conductivity

Abstract It is highly feasible to utilize phase change energy storage technology to construct a phase change material (PCM)‐based thermal management system for electronic devices. In this paper, stearic acid (SA) was used as the PCM, and expanded graphite (EG) was chosen as the carrier to prepare SA/EG CPCM. The results showed that EG could prevent the melted SA from leaking, and the combination between SA and EG was only physical. When the mass fraction of EG was 11%, the SA/EG CPCM had good shape stability with a phase change temperature ( T m ) of 67.2 °C, a phase change enthalpy (∆ H m ) of 204.4 J/g, and a significantly increased in thermal conductivity (6.432 W/(m·K)). In addition, simulation test experiments showed that the peak value of the heating surface was weakened by about 20 °C in the heating stage after loading the CPCM on the electronic device. Therefore, the resultant SA/EG CPCM in this work had great application value.