A thin film made at North Carolina State University barely conducts heat and is also rigid. The material is a two-dimensional hybrid perovskite, built from alternating organic and inorganic layers.
Chemically, it is azobenzene ethyl ammonium lead iodide. The layers form an ordered crystalline structure.
The numbers
At room temperature the film's thermal conductivity is about 0.04 W/mK. Silicone sits around 0.2, so the new film insulates five times better, and it approaches the theoretical limit for dense materials.
It is also 700 to 10,000 times stiffer than silicone. The organic layer contains specially tailored benzene rings.
"We've created a material that is very stiff and is extremely good at insulating against heat," says Jun Liu, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. He and his colleagues say it beats every material found in nature.
From pans to spacecraft
The film is made with a process that scales. "You can produce it at fairly large scales, apply it as a coating, and so on," Liu says.
Physics professor Dali Sun, a co-author, points to where that could matter. "Stiff materials that are good thermal insulators would have substantial utility in a variety of applications, from cookware to electronic devices to space travel," he says.
Ziqi Wang is the first author of the paper, published in Science Advances.
