Influence of environmental factors on the adsorption capacity and thermal conductivity of silica nano-porous materials

In this work, the influence of temperature and humidity environment on the water vapor adsorption capacity and effective thermal conductivity of silica nano-porous material is conducted within a relative humidity range from 15% to 90% at 25 °C, 40 °C and 55 °C, respectively. The experiment results show that both the temperature and relative humidity have significant influence on the adsorption capacity and effective thermal conductivity of silica nano-porous materials. The adsorption capacity and effective thermal conductivity increase with humidity because of the increases of water vapor concentration. The effective thermal conductivity increases linearly with adsorption saturation capacity at constant temperature. Because adsorption process is exothermic reaction, the increasing temperature is not conducive to the adsorption. But the effective thermal conductivity increases with the increment of temperature at the same water uptake because of the increment of water thermal conductivity with temperature Geometric models and unit cell structure are adopted to predict the effective thermal conductivity and comparisons with the experimental result are made, and for the case of moist silica nano-porous materials with high porosity no quantitative agreement is found. It is believed that the adsorbed water will fill in the nano-pores and gap and form lots of short cuts, leading to a significant reduction of the thermal resistance.