Thermal Conductivity of Foam Glasses Prepared using High Pressure Sintering

The increasing focus on better building insulation is important to lower energy consumption. Development of new and improved insulation materials can contribute to solving this problem. Foam glass has a good insulating effect due to its large gas volume (porosity >90 %). It can be produced with open or closed pores. If only open pores exist, air is the dominating medium for the insulating effect. However, closed pores make it possible to trap gases inside the foam. The gas can be introduced either chemically, through foaming agents, or physically, by gas compression-decompression at high temperatures. By introducing the gas physically it is possible to control composition of both the gas phase and the solid phase of the foam glass. In this work we have prepared foam glasses by physical foaming. Panel glass powder from obsolete televisions was first sintered under a gas pressure of 5-25 MPa using helium, nitrogen, or argon. The sintering result in closed-porous body with high pressure bubbles. Subsequent reheating above the glass transition temperature resulted in an expansion of the bubbles. The entrapped gas composition was analysed by gas chromatography. Furthermore, we investigated how the thermal conductivity varies with gas composition. This allows us to determine the contribution of the gas and solid phase to the total thermal conductivity of a foam glass.