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Stearic acid (SA) is being used as phase change material (PCM) in energy storage applications. In the present study, the microencapsulation of SA with SiO2 shell was carried out by sol–gel method. Different amounts of SA (5, 10, 15, 20, 30 and 50 g) were taken against 10 ml of tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) for encapsulation. The synthesized microencapsulated PCM (MEPCM) were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscope (FT-IR), X-Ray diffraction (XRD), X-Ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The characterization results showed that SA was successfully encapsulated by SiO2. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) exhibited better thermal stability of the MEPCM than SA. The enthalpy values of MEPCM were found to be unchanged even after 30 heating–cooling cycles by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The latent heats of melting and solidification of 50 g SA containing MEPCM were found to be highest i.e. 182.53 J/g and 160.12 J/g, respectively among all microencapsulated samples. The encapsulation efficiency values were calculated using thermal data and the efficiency was found to be highest i.e. 86.68% in the same sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]