Characterization and analysis of functional ultra-light construction materials

Abstract

After the energy crisis in the 1970s, developed countries have started working on the implementation of building energy efficiency, but China has ignored the problems in this regard. Today, the building energy efficiency in China is far behind that of developed countries. In view of the large population and energy consumption in China, the building energy efficiency should be given more attentions from both government and the public. As potential materials to be used in constructions to realize building energy efficiency, materials with great thermal properties such as latent heat storage materials, low-thermal-conductivity-coefficient materials should get more attentions. This research is focus on testing and analyzing the thermal properties of functional ultra-light construction materials based on rigid polyurethane foam. The application of rigid polyurethane foams in construction materials has been studied for a long time and proved to be feasible. However, people do not give much attention to the research about thermal properties of rigid polyurethane foams with functional fillers, such as phase change materials and inorganic fly-ash cenosphere. In this research, morphology and thermal properties of rigid polyurethane foam based functional ultra-light construction materials are characterized by SEM, DSC and TGA respectively. And for phase change material-containing rigid polyurethane foam, a box based on the chosen syntactic foam is built to see how much potentiality on earth is there to combine phase change materials with rigid polyurethane foam. And for fly-ash cenosphere filled rigid polyurethane foam, a promising application as inner core for a novel ‘sandwich’ building wall is demonstrated.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology