A novel super thermal insulation material: bamboo-like polymer nanotubes.

: One-dimensional nanomaterials have widespreadly applied in the fields of energy conversion and storage due to thier exceptional performance from nano-size effect. Herein, we synthesized bamboo-like polymer nanotubes based on cationic polymerization using immiscible initiator nanodroplets that results in a hollow structure. The suspended microelectrode is fabricated to measure the axial thermal conductivity of single polymer nanotube, which demonstrates that this hollow structure can reduce its effective thermal conductivity. The experimental results show that its effective thermal conductivity is close to 0.03 W·m-1·K-1, and decreases to 0.02 W·m-1·K-1 with the increasing temperature of heating microelectrode, which may be due to the increasing lattice vibration and inelastic scattering between phonons. Its effective thermal conductivity is smaller than that of the air and indicates that the synthetic method is an effective way to fabricate thermal insulating polymer nanotubes and significantly lower its effective thermal conductivity, offering a new strategy in the fields of thermal insulation and protection.