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World's Lightest Solid
Erazmus writes: "NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has manufactured the world's lightest solid. At only 3 milligrams per cubic centimeter, it's close to the density of air (1.2 milligrams per cubic centimeter). Spaceflight Now has the article. The article points to JPL's site, along with some amazing pictures."
The aerogel is so old (1932) that this isn't even funny ...
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That's just a challenge to the Materials Science Engineers. Maybe that can make He-gel or H2-gel and get the *solid* material to be lighter than air... at least until gas-diffusion takes over and replaces all of the H2/He with O2. A thin membrane around the outside might even prevent this from happening! I can't wait for (air)floating surfboards and cloud-cities.
take a look at the aerogel photogallery.
Upon seaching Google for the cost of this stuff I ran across Aerogel Super-Insulation made by Aspen Aerogels. They don't have prices on their sites but it looks like somebody is trying to make an insulation product out of it. It says they are trying to break into the 20 billion dollar insulation market and that mass adoption of the product would greatly reduce fossil fuel use around the world.
Where can I get my hands on some of this stuff?
Seriously, how expensive is it to manufacture this stuff? If it were relatively inexpensive (or if it would be if produced in sufficiently large quantities) I could think of thousands of uses for it. Or rather, I could do thousands of useless things with it. At the very least, it would be neat to build a PC case out of it.
Anybody know?
I just found another article about this aerogel. It's not too long, but it does have some worthwhile information. Check it out.
What if you made a hollow sphere of aerogel? How large could you make it and still be structurally sound while containing a vacuum? Or perhaps fill it with Helium? Either way, you could make blocks that are lighter than air.
The engineering possibilities...
Natelie Porman petrified in aerogel?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
What I find remarkable about this substance is not so much its density as the fact that it's strong, too.
There's a great image of a block of this stuff supporting a brick 1,000 times its mass.
That strength is all compression; I don't know how it responds to shear, or tension, or if it's flexible.
Well...this is a ridiculously old story and don't know why it came up, but since we're talking about it...here is the home page for the stuff at NASA. The stuff can stand incredible amounts of pressure, but be sure not to try to tear it...it will. And to see the stuff is just cool. I mean this solid just looks like it floats on you. Oh, and it's a rather expensive manufacturing process, which is why it hasn't found use in your home yet...
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
<p>In two places, the article claims aerogel to have a density "1000 times less" than that of glass. If that's true, then that means it has <i>negative</i> density.</p>
<p>Consider this: What would be the density of something 0 times less dense than glass? (The same as that of glass, of course.) How about something 1 time less dense than glass? (Multiply the density of glass by 1 and subtract: It has 0 density.) So anything beyond 1 multiple means <i>it isn't there</i>.</p>
Rob
At 600 to 1000 m^s/g of surface area it wouldn't take much H2 adhesion to make this a relatively good h2 storage medium. Coating the surface with a monoatomic layer of Ni would seem quite a feat, however. On the other hand if we looked around hard enough we might find a hemoglobin like analogue for hydrogen.
This stuff has some bizarre properties-- mostly air but a great thermal insulator, ridiculously fragile, water soluble, translucent...
If someone figures out how to make this stuff cheaply and in a form that Joe Sixpack the general contractor can slap into building walls without any special care as a thermal (and acoustic? The article mentioned something about 'low sound speed') insulation material, that person will get ultra rich.
Either that, or find a way to make the stuff transparent enough to be used for windows. Hell, if they can toughen it up somehow, it looks see-through enough now to make a nice skylight that won't leak heat like a sieve in the wintertime.
~Philly
In other news, there's been an astonishing breakthrough in the aerospace industry -- jet-powered aeroplanes! These new jet-planes promise to unite the world as travel times are cut in half across the globe. Stay tuned for more breaking news!
I'd buy some setup to look good on my desk.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
OK, I was looking at the JPL site, and I must say that this picture is just amazing. The brick is 2.5 Kg, and the aerogel holding it up is 2 g. Just completely amazing, even if the basic technology is years old. Actually, especially because it is so old.
Geez I find it hard to believe this is the first mention of aerogel on slashdot. This shit is old, anybody who reads Popular Mechanics has read all sorts of stuff about aerogels. For those wondering about the expense of aerogels in production, lab techniques for producing them are pretty costly. IIRC you make them with various metal oxides reacting to form what's called an alcogel which has a 3D lattice of silica molecules with water suspended in the cells of the lattice. The water is forced out of the gel by soaking it in pure alcohol. The new gel is called an alcogel which is then dried supercritically. This forces the alcohol out of the gel leaving only the silica structure left. This process it pretty costly and slow which makes aerogel production sort of unsuitable (for now) in massive scales. There's lots of work being done to find shortcuts in this process, the most promising I recall reading about was to do the supercritical drying in vacuum molding chambers like used in regular plastic molding.
Even cooler than aerogels are hydrogels which instead of being 99.8% air they are like 99% water with a silica lattice structure. There's a bit of work researching hydrogels for use in medicine. Hydrogel strips could be used as bandaids for internal oragans and some other stuff I don't rightly recall at the moment. Aerogels rock.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
That girl holding up a sample... if it is lighter than air, why doesn't it float? Or why didn't they take the picture without woman's hand?
Air pressure must have been low that day... rain...
reason defies logic
The gel walls are quite thin. Air would diffuse in and hydrogen would diffuse out, eliminating the advantage.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
oops, omit the hydrogen part, i was reading too fast
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Rocky and Bullwinkle Show mentioned this stuff. They called it
Upsidaisium. Maybe that's what this stuff should be called
too.
If the aerogel has a density of 3 milligrams per cubic centimemeter, and air has a 1.2 milligrams per cubic centimer, then replacing all of the air in this aerogel with an imaginary massless gas would result in a density of 1.8 milligrams per cubic centimeter, still heavier than air.
However, with further engineering, perhaps someone will invent a solid lighter than air. At that point, I the floating cities that you imagine would probably become as common as floating cities made of blimps are today.