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5
A material’s insulating properties can be tuned at
will
Most materials have a fixed ability to conduct heat, but applying voltage to this thin film
changes its thermal properties drastically.
10 David Chandler | MIT News Office
February 24, 2020
Now, a team of researchers at MIT have made a major leap forward. They have
20 designed a long-sought device, which they refer to as an “electrical heat
valve,” that can vary the thermal conductivity on demand. They demonstrated
that the material’s ability to conduct heat can be “tuned” by a factor of 10 at
room temperature.
25
This technique could potentially open the door to new technologies for
controllable insulation in smart windows, smart walls, smart clothing, or even
new ways of harvesting the energy of waste heat.
The findings are reported today in the journal "Nature's Material", in a paper by
30 MIT professors Bilge Yildiz and Gang Chen, recent graduates Qiyang Lu
PhD’18 and Samuel Huberman PhD ’18, and six others at MIT and at
Brookhaven National Laboratory.
35 Thermal conductivity describes how well heat can transfer through a material.
For example, it’s the reason you can easily pick up a hot frying pan with a
wooden handle, because of wood’s low thermal conductivity, but you might
get burned picking up a similar frying pan with a metal handle, which has
high thermal conductivity.
40
The researchers used a material called strontium cobalt oxide (SCO), which
can be made in the form of thin films. By adding oxygen to SCO in a crystalline
form called brown mille rite, thermal conductivity increased whereas adding
45 hydrogen to it caused conductivity to decrease.
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MATERIAS BÁSICAS
55
In most known materials, thermal conductivity is invariable — wood never
conducts heat well, and metals never conduct heat poorly. As such, when the
researchers found that adding certain atoms into the molecular structure of a
material could actually increase its thermal conductivity, it was an unexpected
60 result. If anything, adding the extra atoms — or, more specifically, ions, atoms
stripped of some electrons, or with excess electrons, to give them a net
charge
— should make conductivity worse (which, it turned out, was the case when
adding hydrogen, but not oxygen).
65
“It was a surprise to me when I saw the result,” Chen says. But after further
studies of the system, he says, “now we have a better understanding” of why
this unexpected phenomenon happens.
It turns out that inserting oxygen ions into the structure of the brown mille rite
70 SCO transforms it into what’s known as a perovskite structure — one that
has an even more highly ordered structure than the original. “It goes from a
low-symmetry structure to a high-symmetry one. It also reduces the amount
of so-called oxygen vacancy defect sites. These together lead to its higher
heat conduction,” Yildiz says.
75
85
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MATERIAS BÁSICAS
1. ¿Por qué dice el texto que los investigadores del MIT han dado un salto
hacia adelante? Por que diseñaron un producto que denominan valvula de
calor eléctrica que puede variar la conductividad térmica a demanda
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MATERIAS BÁSICAS
7. "For example" (4°párrafo) es un conector de ejemplificación, ¿Qué
ideas une?
La conductividad termica que se
transfiere………………………………………………
……una sarten con mango de madera ………………………………
8. "Whereas"(5° párrafo) es un conector de contraste, ¿qué ideas relaciona?
……los investigadores utilizaron un
material…………………………………………………………………………
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MATERIAS BÁSICAS
SCO. (Línea 70) ... en una forma cristalina llamada rito de mille
marron..........
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MATERIAS BÁSICAS
6
MATERIAS BÁSICAS
…………………………………………………………
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MATERIAS BÁSICAS
adding agregando
(línea 58)
adding Al agregar
(línea 63)
understanding compresion
(línea 67)
introducing introducir
(línea 79)
performing realizando
(línea 82)
modeling modelado
(línea 82)