New Inorganic Material Discovered with Lowest Thermal Conductivity Ever Reported
upstart writes:
New Inorganic Material Discovered With Lowest Thermal Conductivity Ever Reported:
A collaborative research team, led by the University of Liverpool, has discovered a new inorganic material with the lowest thermal conductivity ever reported.
[...] The research team, led by Professor Matt Rosseinsky at the University's Department of Chemistry and Materials Innovation Factory and Dr. Jon Alaria at the University's Department of Physics and Stephenson Institute for Renewable Energy, designed and synthesized the new material so that it combined two different arrangements of atoms that were each found to slow down the speed at which heat moves through the structure of a solid.
[...] Combining these mechanisms in a single material is difficult, because the researchers have to control exactly how the atoms are arranged within it. Intuitively, scientists would expect to get an average of the physical properties of the two components. By choosing favourable chemical interfaces between each of these different atomic arrangements, the team experimentally synthesized a material that combines them both (represented as the yellow and blue slabs in the image).
This new material, with two combined arrangements, has a much lower thermal conductivity than either of the parent materials with just one arrangement. This unexpected result shows the synergic effect of the chemical control of atomic locations in the structure, and is the reason why the properties of the whole structure are superior to those of the two individual parts.
If we take the thermal conductivity of steel as 1, then a titanium bar is 0.1, water and a construction brick is 0.01, the new material is 0.001 and air is 0.0005.
Journal Reference:
Quinn D. Gibson, Tianqi Zhao, Luke M. Daniels, et al. Low thermal conductivity in a modular inorganic material with bonding anisotropy and mismatch [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abh1619)
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