Investigation of thermal properties of spacer fabrics with phase changing material by finite element model and experiment

This study presents the developed computational finite element models for transient heat transfer analysis in fabrics enriched by phase change materials along with efforts to provide validation on the basis of obtained experimental results. The environment-friendly butyl stearate is used as a phase change material. Its melting/heating absorption takes place in temperature range from 19℃ to 34℃, and the solidification/heat release occurs from 34℃ to 19℃. An important aspect in this analysis is the investigation of appropriateness of the material samples dimensions selected for effective heat capacity against temperature measurements. For this purpose, we used the combined experimental and finite element simulation-based analysis. A similar computational procedure enabled us to estimate the effective latent specific heat relationship of the fabric with phase change materials coating. The direct usage of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) measurement-based specific heat relationships against temperature in the finite element models ensured good compliance of the computed results with the experiment. For validation of the developed computational models the infrared radiation heating-cooling experiments on fabrics with different deposits of a phase change material were performed. The noticeable influence of content of phase change materials for transient thermal behavior during heating-cooling cycles was determined. The experimental results have been compared against the finite element simulation results.