Xinpeng Zhao
Michigan State University, MI·Materials Science
Good insulation keeps heat in buildings and industrial equipment and lowers energy bills. Yet common insulators such as glass wool and polystyrene foam insulate worse when they get damp.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
Chemistry
- Topics
thermal insulation
thermal conductivity
heat transfer
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Establish how moisture changes heat flow in cellulose-based porous materials by making samples with controlled fiber sizes and pore structures and measuring their thermal conductivity across humidity levels.
- Develop multiscale computer models that link molecular-level water–cellulose interactions to heat transport through the whole porous material.
- Use neutron and X-ray scattering and spectroscopy to see how water spreads across pores of different sizes and within cellulose, and how this shapes the paths heat takes.
More about the research
Some specially designed porous materials made from cellulose, the fiber found in wood and plants, behave in the opposite way: they can insulate better as humidity rises. Moisture makes their structure swell, which slows heat flow through the solid fiber network. Why this happens is poorly understood, which limits practical use.
Why it matters
Insulation that keeps working, or even improves, in humid conditions could cut heat loss and energy costs in buildings. It could also help industries such as manufacturing, petroleum processing and cryogenics, the handling of very cold materials. Understanding why moisture improves some cellulose insulators could guide the design of moisture-resilient insulation made from biomass. This could create new, higher-value uses for plant-derived materials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Chih-Hao Chang
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Materials Science
Establish scalable patterning processes to fabricate nanolattices and their nanoscale building blocks with precisely controlled geometry and material composition.
Taehun Lee
CUNY City College, NY·Engineering
Test whether capillary filling and emptying of liquid in structurally and materially heterogeneous nanostructures can make heat flow strongly in one direction, creating a nanoscale thermal diode.
Yan Wang
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Engineering·Early-career
Determine how wave-like phonons, atomic vibrations that carry heat, travel, scatter and become trapped in periodic, quasi-periodic and aperiodic structures, combining spectral phonon analysis with phonon spectroscopy.
The school
Michigan State University: 28 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 555 research doctorates a year.
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