Glass bricks are effective in letting sunlight into a building, but they are not good insulators and cannot be used across load-bearing walls. However, in experimental new translucent bricks filled with airgel, this is reportedly not the case.
Six years ago, Dr. Jannis Wernery and his colleagues from the Empa research group in Switzerland filled ordinary hollow clay brick cavities with a paste made of airgel particles. The resulting “aerobricks” proved to have very high insulating properties…but of course they were opaque.
Here, the scientists used translucent silica airgel granules to fill the voids between sheets of clear glass that were bonded together (via epoxy resin spacers) to form a long rectangular box shape. .
Once the airgel-filled glass box is sealed, it can be used as a brick that allows sunlight to pass through while preserving the privacy of people in the building.
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Importantly, Empa brick has a measured thermal conductivity of 53 milliwatts/meter Kelvin, making it the “best thermal insulation performance of any brick found in the technical literature, let alone one on the market.” There are.”
Additionally, thanks to the way the vertical spacers within each brick are offset from each other, the bricks boast a compressive strength of 44.9 megapascals, “several times higher than commercially available clay insulating bricks and brick blocks.” is reported. ” This means that it can be used in the construction of load-bearing walls.
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One of the drawbacks of the original aero bricks was the fact that they were significantly more expensive than traditional bricks. Translucent bricks can be used in place of windows and reduce utility costs, so they are considered cost-competitive compared to ordinary building materials.
A paper on translucent airgel bricks recently Architectural Engineering Journal.
Source: Empa
