Renewable energy has become of great interest over the past years in order to mitigate Global Warming. One of the actions gaining attention is the enhancement of the thermal energy storage capacity of Concentrated Solar Power plants. The addition of nanoencapsulated phase change materials (core-shell nanoparticles) to the already used materials has been proposed for that purpose, due to the possibility of increasing thermal storage through the contribution of both core latent heat and sensible heat. In this work, Atomic Layer Deposition has been used to synthesise SiO₂ and Al₂O₃ nanoscale coatings on tin nanoparticles. The multi-encapsulated phase change materials have been characterised in terms of chemical composition, crystalline structure, particle size, thermal stability and thermal storage capacity. Sn@Al₂O₃ nanoparticles present the best thermal behaviour as they show the lowest reduction in the phase change enthalpy over 100 cycles due to the oxidation barrier of the coating. Moreover, the specific heat of both nanoparticles and solar salt-based nanofluids is increased, making the nanoencapsulated phase change material suitable for thermal energy storage applications.

In this work, we report a method to change the surface finish of a standard polyester-based powder coating paint, from gloss to matt, by depositing ultrathin films of Al₂O₃ on the powder coating particles. The coating experiments were performed in a fluidized bed reactor at 1 bar and 27 °C, using a gas-phase coating process of alternating exposure of the particles to the two precursors (trimethylaluminium and water), similar to atomic layer deposition (ALD). We varied the number of coating cycles (1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9 cycles) to obtain film thicknesses of the alumina shell ranging from 1 to 30 nm. The average growth per cycle of the process is 3.5 nm, significantly larger than the one for pure self-limiting ALD. When the average alumina shell was thicker than 6 nm, the shell prevented the flow of the core particles, even though the powder particles did soften above the glass transition temperature. With the particles morphology intact, this resulted in a rough and matte surface finish of the coating after curing. The surface roughness, with a value around 9 μm determined by surface profilometry, is associated to the alumina coated particles as observed with SEM and EDX analysis. In addition, the matte finish coating showed mechanical resistance similar to that of uncoated powder particles.