Photo: Bilakis

What is the best wood insulator?

The nanowood insulated better in both cases. The wood blocked at least 10 degrees more heat than styrofoam or silica aerogel, which had been awarded the Guinness World Record for 'best insulator'. The nanowood, which is white, also effectively reflects sunlight.

aero.umd.edu - Sturdy Insulator Made of Wood - UMD aerospace engineering

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Sturdy Insulator Made of Wood

COLLEGE PARK-- Engineers at the University of Maryland have created a new material that’s as insulating as Styrofoam, but stronger and much more environmentally friendly. “This can insulate better than most other current thermal insulators, including Styrofoam. It is extremely promising to be used as energy efficient building materials,” said Tian Li, a postdoc student with Liangbing Hu’s group in the UMD department of materials science and engineering. She was named to Forbes Magazine’s “30 under 30” list of accomplished young adults in 2018. Wood “conducts” heat along the channels that were used when the tree was alive to shuttle water and nutrients from roots to leaves. However, heat trying to cross the wood grain is blocked. With the wood oriented in the right direction, heat could be blocked or transmitted as the designer desires. To test how much heat was insulated, they measured the temperature on one side of the nanowood, while on the other side of the wood, shining a light in one test and applying heat in another test. The nanowood insulated better in both cases. The wood blocked at least 10 degrees more heat than styrofoam or silica aerogel, which had been awarded the Guinness World Record for ‘best insulator’. The nanowood, which is white, also effectively reflects sunlight. They also tried to crush it and found that, in one direction, the nanowood was 30 times stronger than commercially used thermal insulation materials such as Styrofoam, aerogel or other foams made of cellulose. Nanowood’s tiny fibers don’t cause allergic reactions or irritate lung tissues, unlike glass or wool insulators. The secret to the nanowood is the removal of lignin, the part that makes it brown and rigid. The team also removed some of the short fibers that tangle themselves in with the cellulose fibers that make up the scaffolding-like base structure of the wood. The aligned cellulose fibers then bond with each other and results in a high mechanical strength. The team in the US was assisted by Lars Wågberg of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden. This member of the Wallenberg Wood Science Centre helped analyze the behavior of cellulose fibers in the nanowood. “My research program experiments with nature’s nanotechnology that we see in wood,” said Liangbing Hu, an associate professor in the department of materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland, a member of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, and a member of the Maryland NanoCenter. “We are reinventing ways to use wood that could be useful in constructing energy efficient and environmentally friendly homes.” These wood-based nanotechnologies are being commercialized through Inventwood, a UMD spinoff company of Hu’s research group. The team has made the insulating nanowood in blocks and in a thin, flexible or rollable, form.

‘Anisotropic, lightweight, strong, and super thermally insulating nanowood with naturally aligned nanocellulose’

http://dx.doi.org/

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What is the world's best insulation?

aerogel A: The best insulator in the world right now is most probably aerogel, with silica aerogels having thermal conductivities of less than 0.03 W/m*K in atmosphere. of aerogel preventing ice from melting on a hot plate at 80 degrees Celsius! Aerogel has its amazing properties because it's mostly made out of air.

van.physics.illinois.edu - What is the Best Insulator? | Physics Van | UIUC

A:

The best insulator in the world right now is most probably aerogel, with silica aerogels having thermal conductivities of less than 0.03 W/m*K in atmosphere. of aerogel preventing ice from melting on a hot plate at 80 degrees Celsius! Aerogel has its amazing properties because it's mostly made out of air. In the manufacturing process, first you create a gel, then you remove all the liquid in such a way that the gel walls don't collapse, thus leaving tons of little air pockets. These air pockets then basically shut down conduction and convection, making heat transfer very slow. The way they remove the liquid is really cool - it doesn't work to just evaporate it, because that would end up collapsing the gel, so they actually need to heat up the liquid past the liquid-gas critical point to become a supercritical fluid, then maneuver it back down to a gas. It's nuts! I think a thermos with an aerogel core is a very good idea. In fact, they already exist, and you can find some for sale online!

Matt Z.

Another material that's often used in good lab thermos bottles, called cryostats, is vacuum with layers of superinsulation wrapping. The wrapping is thin plastic (Mylar) coated with a film of aluminum. The vacuum means that there are very few air molecules to conduct heat, and the mylar keeps them from traveling far, sort of like the aerogel. The aluminum reflects thermal radiation, keeping it from carrying heat well. Mike W.