Feathers and Insulation

Insulation is a topic that I always find interesting. Thinking back to my first brick oven, and trying to work out how high heat retention and insulation work, and the various roles that bricks, concrete, sand and vermiculite play — it was all a lot of fun. Besides, what the heck is vermiculite anyway?

Along similar lines, I heard an interesting Podcast today on Fresh Air about “feathers”. According to researchers, feathers developed very early in dinosaurs, and very time they have evolved to serve four different, and important, functions, including color/attraction, water repellence, flight and insulation. To this day, modern manufacturing has not been able to cost-effectively mimic the branching structure of a feather in synthetic insulation, so that goose down is still the most efficient insulating material for a duvet or a coat. Very cool.

Conservation Biologist Explains Why “Feathers” Matter.

Maybe someday we will have cost-effective feather-like (branching) ceramic insulation for pizza ovens that can block a 900F refractory face at equilibrium — in 1″. That would be very cool. Meanwhile, we’ve very happy that woven ceramic insulation has come down in cost to where it has completely replaced vermiculite just in the past few years.

What is vermiculite? Volcanic popcorn.