Fire-resistant and thermal insulation performance of SiC nanofiber batt fabricated from cotton fiber batt

Abstract

The cotton fiber batt is one of the most commonly used thermal insulator in our lives at room temperature because of its flexible and porous structure. The SiC nanofibers have excellent mechanical, physical, and chemical properties such as high mechanical strength and modulus, low density, high-temperature resistance, which is a promising material for high temperature structural materials or thermal insulator. In this work, a flexible SiC nanofiber batt was fabricated from the cotton fiber batt by sol-gel carbothermal reduction reaction. The fluffy carbonized porous cotton batt was used as a template for the fabrication of sponge-liked SiC nanofiber batt composed of single crystalline β-SiC fibers. It exhibits good compressive flexibility, ultra-high porosity (a specific surface area was 30.90 m²/g), excellent high-temperature stability (ranging from −196 °C in liquid nitrogen to 1300 °C under the flame of butane blowtorch) and low thermal conductivity (0.02 W/(m·K) at room temperature). The SiC nanofiber batt, which has low density, excellent high-temperature resistance and oxidation resistance, is a promising material for high-temperature structural materials or thermal insulators under extreme conditions. The facile fabrication method of SiC nanofiber batt from common cotton batt provides a novel technique for economic industrial production of high temperature thermal insulation material.