Functionalized brick slag particles with superhydrophobicity for thermal management applications

Abstract

Obsolete building materials, such as brick slag, stone and reinforced concrete, are difficult to resource recycle without effective disposal. Developing feasible and efficient technologies for solving these problems is a crucial but challenging task. Herein, two functionalized brick materials with thermal management properties and excellent superhydrophobicity that consisting of TiO₂ coated brick particles (WBPs@TiO₂) and Ag coated brick particles (WBPs@Ag) were prepared via in situ growth of TiO₂ nanorods and deposition of silver nanoparticles on the surface of construction waste brick particles. Furthermore, low-surface-energy chemicals were used to modify the surface of coated brick particles to obtain the hydrophobic properties. The results showed that WBPs@TiO₂ displayed excellent radiation cooling properties with infrared emissivity of 0.97. Meanwhile, WBPs@Ag displayed excellent infrared thermal insulation properties with infrared emissivity of 0.65. The hydrophobically modified particles possess great water repellency that the water can stably stay on the surface of brick with large water contact angles for achieving self-cleaning. Moreover, this work not only provides a waste-to-resource strategy to fabricate functional coating derived from construction waste, but also shows great potential in infrared thermal management.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Construction waste
• brick particles
• coating
• infrared radiation
• thermal management
• hydrophobic

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21706100 and 21878132), Youth Talent Cultivation Program of Jiangsu University, High-Level Personnel Training Project of Jiangsu Province (BRA2016142), Key Laboratory of Functional Molecular Solids Foundation (FMS201907).