Supercooling suppression of phase change liquid metal–polydimethylsiloxane soft composites

Abstract

Supercooling is a critical issue of phase change liquid metal composites in their application as stiffness-tuning and shape memory materials because of the thermal hysteresis during heating–cooling cycles. Right now, researchers still have a poor understanding of the supercooling behavior of liquid metal composites; and there have not been any successful attempts to suppress their supercooling effect. The aims of this work are to investigate factors that affect supercooling of Field's metal particles and composites and to find methods that can suppress this supercooling effect. We found that the supercooling behavior is strongly affected by particle sizes, polymer matrix, alloy compositions, and oxide impurities.