Thermal conductivity of a kind of mesoporous silica SBA-15

Mesoporous silica SBA-15 consists of uniform hexagonal, unconnected cylindrical channels with diameters that can be tuned within a range of 1.5 nm-30 nm, and is thought to have a special thermal conductivity. The theoretical investigation of the shell thermal conductivity of the mesoporous silica is performed in the relaxation time approximation in this paper and an available one-dimensional heat transfer model is used to predict the effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of the mesoporous silica. The experimental result of the ETC is also presented for comparison. The shell thermal conductivity of the mesoporous silica decreases with mesochannel radius increasing or wall thickness decreasing, but does not strictly decrease with porosity increasing. The thermal radiation possibly plays a primary role in heat transfer at the large porosity scale. The predicted ETC of SBA-15 with only conduction considered is quite low at the large porosity, even lower than the thermal conductivity of the silica aerogels. To realize it, doping carbon or other matters which can strongly absorb infrared light into SBA-15 is a possible way.