What, you may ask, is aerogel? Aerogels are the world's lightest solid materials, composed of up to 99.98% air by volume. Aerogels are a diverse class of amazing materials with properties unlike anything else. Transparent superinsulating silica aerogels exhibit the lowest thermal conductivity of any solid known. Ultrahigh surface area carbon aerogels power today's fast-charging supercapacitors. And ultrastrong, bendable x-aerogels are the lowest-density structural materials ever developed.
Welcome to Aerogel.org. Here you will find an encyclopedic reference about aerogels, how-to guides for making aerogels and building a do-it-yourself supercritical dryer, the world's most comprehensive aerogel image gallery, a podcast with the world's leading aerogel scientists, and more.
Aerogel's not just for NASA anymore. Welcome to open-source nanotech.
For those of you who have always wanted an aerogel sample disc but didn’t want to shell out $35, here’s your chance to win one! Aerogel Technologies is sponsoring a “twitch” (Twitter pitch) competition to promote their new line of mechanically strong aerogels called Airloys (full disclosure: Aerogel Tech is the primary sponsor of this blog). To enter, all you have to do is pitch an idea on Twitter for a (serious) real-world application that you think Airloys would be good for using the hashtags #aerogel and #airloy (both). The tweeters of their top 10 fave ideas pitched by July 31, 2012 will each win a 1″-class aerogel sample disc!
Cabot Aerogel, makers of the Lumira aerogel particles used in superinsulating skylights, have just announced a cool new coating that makes it possible to touch hot steam pipes, tanks, and steel surfaces without burning your hand! The new coating is called Aerolon and is made by Tnemec Corporation, who uses Cabot’s superinsulating fine-particle Enova aerogel to make the coating. Designed for use in plants and refineries, the coating is painted onto hot surfaces that could easily burn you if accidentally touched. Dr. Dhaval Doshi, Global Applications Development Leader for Cabot Aerogel, says that you can actually put your hand on the hot Aerolon-coated surface for “many seconds” without burning yourself and you instead just feel a gradual increase in heat that tells you to pull back. This is made possible by the fact that aerogels have both low thermal conductivity and low heat capacity, that is, ability to retain heat in their nanostructure, which makes heat transfer through an aerogel coating very slow.
Oh and by the way, the coating also helps prevent heat loss out of pipes and tanks, which means that heat (and money) that would otherwise be wasted goes where it’s supposed to go. Energy literally equals money in a refinery and, believe it or not <20% of all of the pipelines in refineries are insulated due to the cost and hassle associated with installing and maintaining insulation on the pipes. Additionally, traditional insulation materials can trap moisture underneath them, causing the pipe to rust under the insulation (corrosion under insulation, or “CUI”). Looks like this stuff would make insulating refineries paint-on easy?
Happy Aerogel Day from Aerogel.org! Yes, March 26 is the birthday of Samuel Stephens Kistler, the inventor of aerogel. We thought we’d honor him and his contributions to science with a holiday!
On that note, Aerogel.org is getting ready to rev up with some great new content, including long-overdue podcasts and videos! Stay tuned.
Watch the amazing thermal insulating properties of aerogel protect a poor aerogel scientist from the blast of a flame thrower (or not…?) on Discovery Channel’s new skeptic-friendly science show, Penn and Teller Tell a Lie!
In preparation for an upcoming podcast with Dr. Debra Rolison from the Naval Research Laboratory, we’ve just posted a new article about functionalization and why aerogels should be thought of as palettes for making active, functional materials, not just materials destinations themselves. Check it out!
Researchers lead by Dr. Lei Zhai at the University of Central Florida have fabricated a multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWNT) aerogel with an astonishing density of just four milligrams per cubic centimeter!
The work was recently published in ACS Nano and you can view the full manuscript here.
This material is particularly interesting because it is composed of a dispersion of MWNTs which leave a honeycomb structure with controllable porosity. More-so, the aerogel has a large surface area and conducts electricity very well, but is a thermal insulator. This is an ideal characteristic for electronics.
Notably this is not the first aerogel made from carbon nanotubes (or CNTs for short if you’re hip to the materials crowd), nor is it the first CNT-based aerogel to exhibit amazing elastic properties. But it’s a new pathway to making CNT-based aerogels and the resulting materials are pretty cool.
Hype alert: There is a statement being circulated on the Internet that one of the MWNT aerogels these researchers made is the lowest-density aerogel (and thus solid) ever produced. Unfortunately, this is not the case: scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have previously produced a silica aerogel with a density of only 1.1 mg/cc, these ones here are 4 mg/cc.
So how are they made? Here’s the gist. Pristine MWNTs are dispersed as individual tubes in chloroform with a compound called poly(3-hexylthiophene)-b-PTMSPMA (P3HT-b-PTMSPMA) by sonicating for 13 min. This anchors a molecule called PTMSPMA on the surface of the nanotubes. The dispersion of MWNTs then gels in several minutes to several hours depending on the concentration of MWNTs. The resulting gel is aged for 12 h at room temperature and then solvent exchanged into methanol to remove chloroform. An aqueous ammonia solution is then added to crosslink the gel for 12 h by hydrolysis and condensation of the PTMSPMA, during which time the gel shrinks a bit. Finally methanol and ammonia are removed by exchanging the gel into water and the gel is freeze-dried to obtain MWNT aerogels. Note the use of freeze drying here instead of supercritical drying is possible thanks to the improved mechanical properties of the gels which make them more resistant to cracking during solvent removal.
The MWNT aerogels are impressively strong in compression and extremely elastic (squishable) exhibiting a rapid rebound. According to the paper, these properties, along with a high degree of porosity make the material a promising candidate for chemical and pressure sensing.
Alex Capecelatro | January 19th, 2011 | No Comments »
Private astronaut Richard Garriott (also known as “Lord British”, the creator of the Ultima series) received the first-ever Spirit of Yuri’s Night Award in recognition of embodying the Yuri’s Night mission of using space and art to contribute to the future of humanity, both in space and on Earth. Yuri’s Night is an annual worldwide celebration to commemorate the first human spaceflight made by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.
Designed by artist and Aerogel.org co-founder Will Walker, this year’s Yuri is the fist-ever award to incorporate aerogels. The plaque component of the award was custom laser-machined for Yuri’s Night by aerospace engineers Shannon Dong and Thomas Coffee at MIT. Engraved into the plaque is the same trademark, stylized likeness of Yuri Gagarin that serves as the logo for Yuri’s Night worldwide. Illuminated by diffused ambient light, Gagarin’s image glows with a subtle orange-gold hue. Accenting Gagarin’s image is a rosette of five flawless classic silica aerogel discs, the same material used to
insulate the Mars exploration rovers and used to capture comet dust on the Stardust probe. Their characteristic sky-blue cast is contrasted against the black background of the plaque, reminiscent of the contrast of our own spaceship Earth against the blackness of outer space. The particular aerogels used in the award are comprised of 96% air by volume and were produced by Aerogel Technologies, LLC using a robotic high pressure autoclave.
Production of the award was co-sponsored by BuyAerogel.com and Aerogel.org.
For those of you waiting to see aerogel actually commercialized for use in buildings one day, wait no more. Cabot Corporation, maker of Nanogel® aerogel, is already enabling some cool possibilities in architecture by introducing economical translucent superinsulating aerogel granules into skylights and windows. From buildings that look like glowing ice cubes to energy-saving daylighting, Nanogel is already finding uses in architecture projects around the world.
Interested in learning more about Nanogel? On Thursday, March 25, the Construction Specifications Institute will be hosting an online seminar with Cabot Corporation about Nanogel and how it is quickly being incorporated into buildings. Should be a good presentation, especially for architects and engineers interested in the thermal and optical properites of commercially-available aerogel materials.
For those of you interested in actually getting your hands on some, you can experience Nanogel for yourself with product samples from BuyAerogel.com, along with other types of aerogel materials.
The long-awaited second installment of our two-part series “How to Make Silica Aerogel” has finally been posted! Learn how to transform gels into aerogels using supercritical drying in this detailed podcast. A great in-depth guide for those of you interested in making your own aerogels and building your own supercritical dryer, or if you’re already making aerogels but have problems with the aerogels turning out white or cracked.
By the way, if you think all of this is too hard for you to do yourself, know at least three high school students have done all of this without significant budgets or university laboratories!
This week on The Critical Point, in our fourth installment of our continuing series “The People Who Reinvented Aerogel”, we sit down with Prof. Nicholas Leventis from the Missouri University of Science and Technology and learn about ultrastrong, flexible x-aerogels and metal aerogels–two new classes of materials that enable some very exciting technological possibilities. X-aerogels are the first structural aerogels ever developed, and metal aerogels combine conductivity, catalytic activity, and high surface area.
