Featured image: A gummy bear-shaped salogel, that can cut energy consumption in buildings, symbolizes a new class of polymer-salt hydrate hybrid materials developed by researchers in the Texas A&M University Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
Credit: Soft Matter Facility at Texas A&M University
Heating and cooling buildings account for a large portion of global energy use. A research team in the Texas A&M University Department of Materials Science and Engineering was featured on the cover of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces for a study that aims to reduce that energy consumption.
The June 10 issue’s cover art was designed around a class of materials that the research team is calling “salogels.” Salogels are gel-like hybrid materials that pair polymer structures with inorganic salt hydrates to store and release heat.
Salt hydrates already store a large amount of thermal energy and have a high resistance to burning. This is why they work so well at storing heat during the day and releasing it at night. The main problem is that, on their own, they can leak and break down with repeated use. Introducing a polymer network or structure into them can resolve many of these concerns without sacrificing storage capacity.
Dr. Kartik Kumar Rajagopalan, a research scientist in Texas A&M’s Soft Matter Facility (SoMF), led the research under the leadership of Dr. Svetlana A. Sukhishvili, professor and director of SoMF. Dr. Peiran Wei, SoMF facility manager and senior research scientist, is credited with designing the cover art—the gummy bear–shaped salogel.
Beyond building uses, the team focuses on applications in batteries and temperature-control electronics, smart windows, anti-icing coatings, supercapacitors and energy conversion systems.
“Salogels represent a shift from simply storing heat to engineering multifunctional materials that combine thermal energy storage and conversion,” Rajagopalan said. “By understanding how polymers interact with salt hydrates at the molecular level, we can begin to design materials with properties tailored for real-world energy applications.”
This work grew out of several years of research by Sukhishvili’s group on how polymers and salt hydrates interact. It was built on earlier experimental studies, which took several months to bring together.
One major finding was that the polymer network changed how the salt hydrates crystallize and helped prevent supercooling. These findings could eventually feed into a machine learning tool used to design new materials.
Rajagopalan said the group’s next steps include improving the mechanical strength of salogels, reducing supercooling further, testing 3D printing for processing and applying the material to electrochemical energy conversion.
(Tech Explore)