This article reported on the synthesis, characterization, life cycle assessment (LCA) of nano insulation materials (NIMs) that are made of hollow silica nanospheres (HSNSs). The transient plane source (TPS) technique was used to determine the thermal properties of the HSNSs. The thermal conductivity of the HSNSs is quite low at 0.02 W/mK because thermal conductivity is predominantly size-dependent at the nanometer scale. The HSNS NIMs were found to be comparable ...
Buildings are responsible for a large portion of the world’s energy use, so there is a high global demand for cost-efficient thermal insulating materials. In this paper, the thermal properties of hollow silica nanosphere nano insulation materials (HSNS NIMs) were examined to test their potential as superinsulating materials. A thermal constants analyzer measured the thermal conductivity of the NIMs using the transient plane source (TPS) method. Results showed that ...
The authors present the synthesis of hollow silica nanospheres (HSNSs) by a template-assisted approach using polystyrene nanospheres as templates. These nanospheres could potentially be used as nano insulation materials due to their low thermal conductivity ~0.02 W/m K. The authors also examined the environmental footprint of these nanospheres by life cycle assessment, and it was found that they possess a high embodied energy. It was thus suggested that new synthetic ...
