ABSTRACT:  Energy crisis cannot be substantially overcome by developing alternative energy sources.  Considering the exploding demand in the newly developing mega-states such as China and India, and the increasing CO₂ emission control over the global warming issue, energy shortage is an inevitable future even with the oil shale and the shale gas as the new energy resources.  The only way to cope with these challenges is to use energy in a thrifty manner, but not sacrificing the equality of life.  Considering that about 45 percent of the total energy is spent in buildings, mostly for HVAC, super insulation of building is the most urgent task. Vacuum insulation yields 1/10 of thermal conductivity compared with the conventional gas-containing insulation materials.  This makes its application realistic to new and existing buildings by adding very thin insulation layer to the wall.  Besides, vacuum insulation finds more applications to automobiles, cryogenics including LNG, space, medical and chip-level heat transfers. We have been developing innovative vacuum insulators with optimal inner structures, showing less than 0.001W/m-K of thermal conductivity.  This talk will deal with many technical experiences with vacuum insulation over the past 16 years in my lab.  It will be shown that this emerging area is promising to contribute most significantly to the global energy problems, to unveil many unexplored and profound realms of multi-disciplinary technologies, and to open new horizon in business chances.

BIOSKETCH:  Dr. Tae-Ho Song is a professor of KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology).  He worked for KIMM (Korea Institute of Machinery & Materials) until 1988, when he joined KAIST as an assistant professor. He graduated from Purdue Univ. in 1986, and now he is named as POSCO chair-professor since 2014. He worked on solution methods of radiative heat transfer and inverse radiative problems, until he turned his major attention to vacuum insulation from about 15 years ago. After his planned retirement in 2020, he is going to run a lab on vacuum insulation.