The test setup comprised of a vacuum insulated containment canister sealed with a thermally controlled lid equipped with a thermocouple sensor shroud. A controllable heating cooling loop was used to simulate entropy in the test environment while a high-precision voltage reader recorded the electrical spikes from a thermoelectric generator plate sandwiched between the thermal control surface and the PCM. The thermal control surface's temperature was oscillated in accordance to weather data from a desert and the integral of the output voltage was averaged over time. This process was performed multiple times for each PCM and averaged out to obtain a final, single-dimensional, result quantifying the performance of each PCM. This succeeded in proving octadecane's superiority against paraffin as a phase change material.
