Realizing the person thermal management (PTM) toward
human body
and its local environment is emerging as a research hotspot. Sodium
sulfate decahydrate (SSD) possessing reversible thermal energy absorption,
storage, and release around the human body temperature provides a
promising solution for PTM and thermal comfort. However, developing
SSD-based functional materials with superior thermophysical properties
and wearability to enable efficient PTM still remains a huge challenge.
Herein, a strategy of ionic cross-linking, chemical cross-linking,
and boron nitride (BN) doping is developed to manufacture the high-performance
hybrid SSD gels. The supercooling degree of the BN@SSD gels can be
reduced to 0 °C. The thermal conductivity (1.2668 W m–1 K–1) of the BN@SSD gels can be increased by 63.14%.
The BN@SSD gels present a large thermal energy storage capacity of
132.52 J g–1. The BN@SSD gels demonstrate excellent
form stability to confine the liquid SSD and high cyclic stability
of 200 cycles. Furthermore, The BN@SSD gels also possess superior
wearability in terms of high flexibility, high self-repairing efficiency,
and high cost effectiveness (5.53 × 10–3 ¥
g–1). Owing to the various merits of the synergistic
enhancement effect, the BN@SSD gels are effectively utilized in wearable
PTM to generate thermal comfort for the human body. The multifunctional
thermal energy storage gels offer a promising route to the highly
efficient application of PCMs in next-generation PTM.
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