Fatty Acid Amides Phase Change Materials (PCMs) from Commercial Vegetable Oils and Primary Alkyl Amines

Abstract: As the world focuses on reducing CO₂ emissions and improving energy efficiency, phase change materials (PCMs) have gained popularity. PCMs absorb significant amounts of energy when they melt and release it back into their surroundings as they solidify. This characteristic makes them excellent candidates for applications requiring passive thermal energy storage or temperature regulation in various systems. Most PCMs currently available are derived from petroleum sources. To minimize their environmental impact, efforts are underway to develop bio-based alternatives. In this talk, I will discuss my group's work synthesizing bio-based fatty acid amides (FAAMs) from commercial vegetable oils and primary alkyl amines. Our results indicate that the FAAMs synthesized from corn and sunflower oils can serve effectively as PCMs. They demonstrated consistent melting and solidification transitions over narrow temperature ranges, even without fractionating or separating the materials. We found that the melting temperature of the FAAMs increases with the length of the precursor amine, and a similar trend was observed for latent heat, except for FAAMs derived from hexadecylamine. The latent heat of the synthesized materials reached as high as 141 kJ/kg, and all FAAMs remained thermally stable at temperatures below 200°C. Finally, I will also discuss the encapsulation of FAAMs.