Nano Insulation Materials: Synthesis and Life Cycle Assessment

The application of manufactured nanomaterials provides not only advantages resulting from their unique properties, but also disadvantages derived from the possible high energy use and CO2 burden related to their manufacture, operation, and disposal. It is therefore important to evaluate the trade-offs of process economics with the associated environmental impacts in order to strengthen the existing advantages while counteracting disadvantages of nanomaterials. This is of particular importance at the early stage of the development, where different synthetic approaches with different energy and environmental impacts may be employed. We discuss here the importance of life cycle assessment (LCA) on the synthesis of nano insulation materials (NIMs) consisting of hollow silica nanospheres (HSNSs). The results indicate that the use of recyclable and environmentally friendly raw materials can improve greatly the process environmental footprints. New synthetic procedures are developed accordingly for HSNS NIMs with improved environmental features as well as thermal insulation performance

The High Performance Thermal Building Insulation Materials of Beyond Tomorrow - From Concept to Experimental Investigations

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Thermal Superinsulation for Building Applications - From Concepts to Experimental Investigations

The application of traditional thermal insulation materials requires thicker building envelopes in order to satisfy the requirements of the emerging zero energy and zero emission buildings. This work summarizes the steps from the state-of-theart thermal insulation materials and solutions, like vacuum insulation panels (VIP), gas-filled panels (GFP) and aerogels which all have various drawbacks, to our concepts and experimental investigations for making superinsulation materials (SIM) like e.g. nano insulation materials (NIM).publishedVersion© 2014 The Authors. Published by IRED/SEEK digital library. This is an open access article