Insulation Manufacturers Announce New Airtight Fiberglass

You know how fiberglass insulation gets a bad rap because it doesn’t stop air leakage?  Go look around in an attic and you’ll see nasty old insulation that’s full of dirt (see lead photo).  Some people even call it “filterglass” because it filters our dirt as the air moves freely though it.  Well, those days could be coming to an end.  A consortium of insulation manufacturers announced a breakthrough in building enclosure materials this week:  a new airtight fiberglass.  The initial research came out in 2023, and now manufacturers are getting the new product ready for shipment to distributors.  I know you’re probably skeptical, but read on.  It’s a fascinating new development based on quantum physics.

Meet  the entangled glass matrix

The initial research from the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany began a decade ago.  At the time, they were working on the concept of polarized thermal energy, which I wrote about here ten years ago.  That turned out to be a dead end, but one of the researchers, Dr. Ötzi Eismann of Fraunhofer stumbled on a new path to building enclosure improvements.

While looking for polarized heat, what Eismann found instead was a bizarre kind of quantum entanglement happening within the glass fibers of an insulation sample.  In fact, the phenomenon created an entangled glass matrix.  Eismann wrote this up for a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Quantum Building Materials in 2023.  The diagram below is from that paper and shows how it works.

The detailed explanation is beyond the scope of this blog (and also beyond my ability to explain since I’ve forgotten most of the quantum physics I learned in grad school).  But the basic idea is that the individual glass fibers attain a state of quantum entanglement that makes the material act essentially like a solid material.

And yes, that material behaving like a solid is really just fiberglass and air.  But the entanglement locks up the two into what scientists call an entangled glass matrix.

Brilliant!

Blower door testing won’t work on QuantumGlass^TM

The bad news is that all you folks who determine airtightness with a blower door are going to have to invest in new tools…that don’t exist yet.  This is a result of relying on quantum physics.  If you know what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is, you can guess the reason.

Because we’re dealing with quantum properties, the Uncertainty Principle says you can’t measure something without changing it.  That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.  A house insulated with QuantumGlass^TM, one of the brand names for commercially available entangled glass matrix insulation, will be perfectly airtight…as long as you don’t try to measure it with a blower door.

The Fraunhofer researchers, led by Dr. Eismann, are working on new ways to get around the difficulty.  They currently believe that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox will lead them to an airtightness testing solution that works.  They’re attacking this through the idea of the bugblatter beast, which is a not-very-smart animal that assumes you can’t see it if it can’t see you.

See it at the National Home Performance Conference

And there’s great news for all of you going to the National Home Performance Conference in Columbus, Ohio in two weeks.  Fiberglass insulation manufacturers have been burning the midnight oil for the past three years to bring the new airtight fiberglass insulation to market.  Knauf, Owens Corning, Johns Manville, and perhaps others will have their versions of the airtight entangled glass matrix at the trade show.  You really shouldn’t need another reason to go to this conference, but if you do, this is  it.

There you have it.  “Filterglass” is about to meet its end.  The new airtight fiberglass insulation using an entangled glass matrix is about to take over the world of insulation.  I know I’ll be spending a lot of time at their booth, and I hope to see you there.

Oh, and happy April Fools’ Day!

Note:  I don’t usually explain my obscure references, but there are a couple here that you might be scratching your head over.  Ötzi Eismann is a nod to Ötzi the ice man.  The bugblatter beast is actually the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, a fictional creature from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

Allison A. Bailes III, PhD is a speaker, writer, building science consultant, and the founder of Energy Vanguard in Decatur, Georgia.  He has a doctorate in physics and is the author of a bestselling book on building science.  He also writes the Energy Vanguard Blog.  For more updates, you can follow Allison on LinkedIn and subscribe to Energy Vanguard’s weekly newsletter and YouTube channel.

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