Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

World's Lightest Solid

Posted by timothy on from the hull-foam dept.

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."

5 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. good recipe: by b_pretender · · Score: 5, Interesting
    quote: "It's probably not possible to make aerogel any lighter than this because then it wouldn't gel""

    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.

  2. Insulation by DeadSea · · Score: 4, Informative
    This stuff was used on Mars missions to capture particles so I thought it would be really expensive stuff. No way that you would ever be able to afford enough of it to actually insulate your house, even though it is 39 times better at it than the best fiberglass insulation.

    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.

  3. The big question: by Goronguer · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  4. Re:Old news .... by b_pretender · · Score: 4, Informative
    "Aerogels had been largely forgotten when, in the late 1970s, the French government approached Stanislaus Teichner at Universite Claud Bernard, Lyon seeking a method for storing oxygen and rocket fuels in porous materials. There is a legend passed on between researchers in the aerogel community concerning what happened next. Teichner assigned one of his graduate students the task of preparing and studying aerogels for this application. However, using Kistler's method, which included two time-consuming and laborious solvent exchange steps, their first aerogel took weeks to prepare. Teichner then informed his student that a large number of aerogel samples would be needed for him to complete his dissertation. Realizing that this would take many, many years to accomplish, the student left Teichner's lab with a nervous breakdown. Upon returning after a brief rest, he was strongly motivated to find a better synthetic process. This directly lead to one of the major advances in aerogel science, namely the application of sol-gel chemistry to silica aerogel preparation. This process replaced the sodium silicate used by Kistler with an alkoxysilane, (tetramethyorthosilicate, TMOS). Hydrolyzing TMOS in a solution of methanol produced a gel in one step (called an "alcogel"). This eliminated two of the drawbacks in Kistler's procedure, namely, the water-to-alcohol exchange step and the presence of inorganic salts in the gel. Drying these alcogels under supercritical alcohol conditions produced high-quality silica aerogels. In subsequent years, Teichner's group, and others extended this approach to prepare aerogels of a wide variety of metal oxide aerogels. "

    Poor graduate student. I can relate to him, although my ZTP-Al2O3 shortcuts didn't revolutionize anything, and I ended up leaving prior to finishing my thesis. I did, however, still graduate MS.

  5. Lighter-than-air idea by crow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...