Thermally insulating and moisture-resilient foams from chemically upcycled organic waste

The purpose of this project is to develop novel routes for chemical upcycling, assembly and processing of organic waste into thermally insulating foams, and to improve the understanding of heat conduction and phonon transport in organic waste-based nanocomposites.

Development of thermally insulating materials based on upcycled waste materials could substantially improve the energy efficiency of buildings and reduce the environmental impact.

Novel chemical routes will be developed to extract upcycled nanofibrils from textiles, e.g. cotton and Kevlar, and other organic waste that can generate thin fibrils.

The materials will be crosslinked using bioinspired routes, with a focus on tanning with natural plant-based tannins and molecular-recognition based crosslinking, to improve the mechanical properties, in particular in the wet state.

Novel assembly and colloidal processing methods of the upcycled nanofibrils to generate light-weight, superinsulating and moisture-resilient foams will be developed with a focus on scalable routes.

Detailed insight on the structural development will be obtained by time-resolved studies that e.g. combine small-angle X-ray scattering and imaging.

The phonon transport and heat conduction in the organic waste-based foams and aerogels will be investigated in detail by a combination of thermal conductivity measurements, Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations and direct measurements of phonon transport.