Microstructure and property characterization of flexible syntactic foam for insulation material via mold casting

The flexible syntactic foam with increasing attention as an eco-friendly building insulation material was manufactured via mold casting. The total porosity of the dried flexible syntactic foam had a very high value of 0.86 and the large vacant volumes in the microstructure were observed. The hollow glass spheres with the wide range of diameters were uniformly distributed inside the syntactic foam. It had low mechanical strength but showed toughness on a large compressive deformation. The thermal properties of the flexible syntactic foam were measured and compared with other insulation materials by dual probe method. The thermal conductivity and diffusivity of the flexible syntactic foam were 0.053 W/m·K and 0.097 mm 2 /s respectively. It also has low thermal effusivity thus it can be applied to a burn injury protection layer on high temperature surface.