Exploring supercooling phenomena through extensive experimental method design

For phase change materials (PCMs) one of the main challenges for industrial applications is the supercooling phenomena, leading to a hysteresis in the temperatures measured for melting and solidification of the material. Supercooling is however, a challenging property both to accurately measure and understand. There have been many attempts to model this phenomenon mathematically with various success. Most known models have been modified to fit specific experimental conditions and are thus not transferrable to other systems, neither small nor large scale. The current work has focused on designing a set or experiments where different parameters have been changed, particularly the sample size in order to understand the effect of container size on the supercooling behavior. This work sheds light on the effect that supercooling may impose on PCM-based industrial scale thermal energy storage.