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Abstract Quantifying the performance of phase change materials (PCMs) for thermal energy storage in high-power short-duration electronics applications requires performing tests that push the material to its limit. This involves designing experiments to test solid-liquid PCMs in near real-world thermal load conditions to test its performance. Conventional cooling methods are sized to manage the maximum loading the cooling system will be subjected to in its operation, even if this loading occurs for a short period of time. This design ethos is inefficient and results in heavy and expensive equipment being used in an application where it will be underutilized most of its useful life. In this work, a PCM thermal energy storage (TES) device was built using a plate-and-frame heat exchanger and investigated to determine the suitability of this system to manage the temperature of high-power electronics with a low duty cycle. These experiments showed how a PCM-TES can be used in conjunction with conventional temperature management equipment to create a reliable cooling solution while allowing the conventional cooling components to be decreased in size and capacity. This work shows that, for a given application, a cooling system can be more efficiently designed with the use of a PCM-TES and opens the door to additional research on this topic.
Martheleur et al. (Wed,) studied this question.