Specific heat capacity of nanoporous Al2O3

Based on Lindemann's criterion, a specific heat capacity model for nanoporous material was proposed by defining the surface-atom layer, to take the surface atoms and the volume atoms separately into account. The height of the surface-atom layer was determined from the experiment, and results show that only the first layer atoms on the surface should be separately considered for nanoporous Al2O3. The shape factor of the pore was also introduced in the model with values between 2 (for cylindrical pore) and 3 (for spherical pore) to characterize the morphology of the pore. It turns out experimentally that the specific heat capacity of the analyzed nanoporous Al2O3 is much larger than that of the bulk, which can be interpreted as due to the fact that the surface atom plays a more important role than the volume one. And the smaller the radius and/ or the larger the porosity, which lead to a larger surface-volume ratio, the larger the specific heat capacity becomes. The nanoporous material could be a better heat storage medium than the corresponding bulk with a much lighter weight, smaller volume but higher heat storage capacity. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2013