Thermal and compression characteristics of aerogel-encapsulated textiles

In this work, a new approach to apply silica aerogel into textiles by laser treatment and laminating technique was used to fabricate aerogel-encapsulated textiles. Thermal insulation performance of the prepared multilayer aerogel-encapsulated laminated fabrics was characterized in terms of thermal conductivity, thermal resistance and thermal diffusivity by Alambeta instrument. Infrared thermography data were collected by FLIR ThermaCAM TVS300 thermal camera. The ORIENTEC STA-1225 Universal Testing Machine was employed for testing the compression properties like compression resistance, compression resilience and thickness loss. Results showed that the aerogel-encapsulated structure has significant effect on thermal insulation enhancement. A temperature gap of 1℃ to 1.5℃ was observed between aerogel-filled samples and regular ones. It is also found that nonwoven fabrics with aerogel-filled voids generally have lower compression resistance than regular nonwovens, samples with air-filled voids and aerogel-filled voids are observed to recover compression to a lower extent than regular samples. Nonwoven based aerogel-encapsulated composites exhibit lower thickness loss in comparison with untreated composites. The findings in this study can be used for further research in aerogel-encapsulated composites.