The microencapsulation of volatile phase change materials is an important and challenging area for low-temperature thermal energy storage. Our previous studies have effectively addressed the challenge of long-term volatile core retention and also indicated that the quality of the obtained poly(urea-formaldehyde) microcapsules is highly affected by various process parameters, including reaction temperature, initial pH, reaction time, and homogenization speed. In this paper, the Taguchi orthogonal array has been employed to optimise controllable process parameters to identify the most synergistic combination, in order to maximise the payload, yield, and encapsulation efficiency. The Taguchi signal-to-noise ratio results substantiated that the most efficient combination of parameters was 3 h reaction time, pH 3.5, 55 °C reaction temperature, and 1200 rpm homogenization speed. With this combination of parameters, microcapsules with superbly high payload of 95.2%, as well as a yield of 30.5% and encapsulation efficiency of 71.1% were amalgamated. In addition, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was also utilised to demonstrate the mean response magnitudes (% contribution) of each of the four controllable process parameters, in terms of contribution for the payload, yield, and encapsulation efficiency. Overall, it was indicated that the temperature is the most influential parameter at 83.1% contribution, followed by pH at 6.8%, reaction time at 5.2%, and homogenization speed at 4.9%. Such findings in this work postulate the fundamental insights into maximising the output of the formulation conditions, which in turn is aimed to minimise the time and cost of production of the microcapsules.

挥发性相变材料的微囊化是低温热能存储的重要且具有挑战性的领域。我们之前的研究有效地解决了长期挥发性核保留的挑战，并且还表明，所获得的聚（脲-甲醛）微胶囊的质量受到各种工艺参数的高度影响，包括反应温度，初始pH，反应时间和均质化速度。在本文中，Taguchi正交阵列已被用于优化可控制的工艺参数，以识别最协同的组合，从而最大程度地提高有效负载，产量和封装效率。Taguchi信噪比结果证实，最有效的参数组合是3小时反应时间，pH 3.5、55°C反应温度，和1200 rpm的均质速度。通过这种参数组合，将具有95.2％的极高有效负载，30.5％的收率和71.1％的封装效率的微胶囊混合在一起。此外，方差分析（ANOVA）还被用来证明四个可控过程参数中每个参数的平均响应幅度（贡献百分比），分别是对有效负载，产量和封装效率的贡献。总的来说，表明温度是影响最大的参数，贡献率为83.1％，其次是pH值为6.8％，反应时间为5.2％和均质速度为4.9％。这项工作中的这些发现推测出了在最大化制剂条件输出方面的基本见识，而这反过来旨在使微胶囊的生产时间和成本最小化。