When you press a pan it boils a few times faster

this is the opposite of that

imagine blobs of water floating near freezing ice crystals form branches from the blobs if there were a pile of these there would be liquid water separated with ice girders Now if there were a warm side with variation known as anisotropy then those ice girders near the warm areas would melt leaving the supports at the cooler anisotropic points

The material would actually be like a polymer that changes volume when warmed it could retract from those anisotropic points creating higher r value

also The R value of foam might be higher if the bubbles were coated with an IR dichroic

I think that a pile of thermoses is better at refusing temperature change than a pile of spheres This is rather like that
-- beanangel, Sep 04 2009

Insulating foam will not have the same properties at a macro scale that water has at a molecular scale. A cellular insulator cannot "shrink away" when it gets cold without losing structural integrity. nor can it become a fluid without losing its insulative property.

Anisotropic heat conductivity is simply not a macro phenomenon.

It is more accurate to think of a refrigerator box as a system for rejecting outside heat and retaining inside air than a system for retaining "cold".
-- WcW, Sep 05 2009


Beanie, I suggest you learn a little about Q, and <delta>phases for water, and then come back and tell us all exactly why this was such a dumb idea.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 05 2009



random, halfbakery