Wood for Thermal Energy Storage

For thousands of years wood had been used for many fundamental purposes, as a fuel or as a material for building houses and creating tools and furniture. Today, many researches aim to improve the properties of this traditional material for further innovative applications. Here we will consider the enhancement of the wood thermal features by means of its impregnation with phase change materials (PCMs). A PCM is a substance absorbing and releasing thermal energy at a phase transition. Therefore, wood and PCMs can be composed to be useful for the thermal energy storage, that is for heating and cooling applications. Here we propose a discussion of recent literature about development and applications of wood-based composite PCMs.