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The Amazing Properties of Aerogel
RideMax writes "We all know NASA is using a substance called 'aerogel' in the Stardust spacecraft to catch pieces of the Wild-2 comet. The NYT is running an article about some other amazing aerogel properties. My favorite quote: 'It's the lowest density of any solid, and it has the highest thermoinsulation properties. Though it would be very expensive, you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house would become too hot.'" We've looked at Aerogel before.
But does it's insulation properties beat that of Trellium-D?
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
If you goddamn kids would close the goddamn door!
I have been pwned because my
Though it would be very expensive, you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle.
Seems to me that in this case, having a few lights left on or PC with a hot CPU left running would quickly make things uncomfortable
What if it was only used to certain walls where leakage was most common?
I'm just curious as to what the R-factor would be. The article does not specify this.
aka Vaporware... Made of 99.6 percent empty space, the little cube is indeed barely there, with a density one-hundredth that of the hand that holds it.
- It is 99.8% Air
- Provides 39 times more insulating than the best fiberglass insulation
- Is 1,000 times less dense than glass
- Was used on the Mars Pathfinder rover
And a cool picture of aerogel in somebody's hand.--
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
(AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History.
Seems like quite a few successes are discovered by mistake.. in this instance, finding a rejected material from nuclear testing.
It also has incredible compressive strength. "It can take 2,000 times its body weight without damage," Dr. Tsou said. NASA's Web site shows a 2-gram cube of aerogel (less than 0.1 ounce) supporting a 2.5-kilogram brick (about 5.5 pounds).
That particular example doesn't seem that impressive, I used to build balsa wood structures that would hold over 600 lbs(~270kg), with only 15 grams of balsa wood and glue, with strict rules on how it could be built. The world record is somewhere in the 1500 lb mark with a similar weight of wood.
Very good Aerogel FAQ.
--
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
(AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History.
I heard of Aerogel long ago, but I assume the issue is the same as then - price. Is it getting better, or is it still for those really really extreme projects only? It's cool in the same way superconductors are, but you don't get to play around with them...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
let me get this straight....virtually unbelieveable insulation at the coldest of temperatures...creating super greenhouses/habitats and so forth...
improves the desalination of seawater plants a thousand fold...
my god....all we have to do is find a cheap or easier way to produce (like we do with virtually everything in the world in the free enterprise system) and we can offer virtually energy free habitats (excess heat can be channelled into electronics and solar can pick up the rest) - as well as a cheap water supply for the world...
christ...someone get me some chemists and a few venture capitalists.....this is incredible... - and it's real and now...not like those carbon nanofibers people want to use to create space elevators...
pax
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Buy some aerogels, made in Germany. We know that they have great insulating properties, but is it insulating per unit weight? If that is the case, it is probably because they weigh so little and therefore they don't allow any convective cooling. All the cooling has to be by temperature conduction, which is not efficient in air.
You know what I'm talkin' about. *Wink*Wink* Nudge*Nudge* :P
The article doesn't touch on it, but the NASA FAQ mentions this unique property...
Q: What happens if I touch it?
A: Silica aerogel is semi-elastic because it returns to its original form if slightly deformed. If further deformed, a dimple will be created. However, if the elastic limit is exceeded, it will shatter catastrophically, like glass.
Some cool shots.
Here's a nerdy factiod about aerogel that might help your processor speed.
There has been some close research into using substances like aerogel to improve processor speeds. Apparently the substances can be used as very efficient insulators between traces and components. This is because aerogel and substances like it are mostly made of air, which has a very high dielectric constant so aerogel itself is a very good insulator.
It's better described here
This informative comment was lifted from a comment made the last time aerogels were discussed on slashdot (see the original comment here).
While I'm sure aerogel has many pracitcal uses (trying not to fall asleep here), the "cool" factor is also very high. I've seen some of her samples, and everything the article says is correct. It's so light it feels like the wind could take it; in fact, if you drop it in water, I think it dissolves. Since the material is so expensive, it's obviously something you don't want to do, since every last piece is precious.
As you might imagine, a material that's ultra-light and 'holographic' has artistic applications, too. The "brain" image made it onto the cover of Nature neuroscience, and wouldn't look out of place in a design magazine. When you see it up close, the image seems to be 'embedded' in the material, even though it's so light you could easily crush it with your hand. The airiness and delicacy of the material makes the image that much more striking.While we're all attuned to the utilitarian value of materials like this, it's always neat to see what people outside of engineering can do with them.
Clothing insulated with aerogel is available now: GRADO ZERO ESPACE
Check it out - this auction on Ebay is selling a 4-6 Cubic inch chunk of Aerogel with a "Buy it Now" price of $160. Considering the auction says it costs about $200 per cubic inch to make, thats a deal. I'm guessing some /.'er with deep pockets will be buying this pretty soon!
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you can buy this stuff from MarkeTech for the rock bottom price of $975 a 4x8x0.5" piece.
I'll let someone else figure out how expensive an entire house would be to insulate.
Note that this isn't even the really good stuff (the average density of the commercial stuff is only 99.9% air, while the hi-tech versions used by NASA can be as high as 99.99% air or more)
For those of you who like stupid science tricks/supercheap climate control, here's a trick for how to heat and cool a house without using any energy (outside of what's free from the Sun):
/ blackbody/bbody.html), which gives 300-500W/m^2 at typical Earth temperatures (over 400W/m^2 heat loss at typical room temperature).
First, some background on black body radiation. All matter radiates some light, based on its temperature. By basic thermodynamics, the amount of radiation that a color of matter absorbs in a given frequency range (as opposed to reflects) is directly proportional to how much it radiates (as compared to a perfect black body of the same temperature).
The sun only radiates on a fairly small set of frequencies, and that set is very different from the frequencies at which a black body at room temperature radiates. If you build a panel of a material that is perfectly absorbent in the frequencies on which the Sun radiates (perfect black body), but reflects in the remaining frequencies (perfectly white on the blackbody frequencies of room temperature), it will lose very little heat to radiation, but absorb a lot from the sun, and it'll get very hot. If you take a body that reflects radiation in the colors the sun emits (white), but absorbs/radiates elsewhere (black), it'll get very, very cool, even in bright sunlight. You can get pretty close to the full 1000W/m^2 of heating (level of Sun's radiation hitting the earth). In cooling, you get pretty close to the ideal from Stefan's Law (http://www.egglescliffe.org.uk/physics/astronomy
This means that you can theoretically heat or cool a house with just a painted square on the roof a few square meters in area, if you could just create a material of the right color.
Problem is the guy who came up with this (and showed it to me) was a physicist and not a chemist, and had no idea how one would go about creating a material whose color was that well controlled.
Still a nifty concept, eh? If you could make this, it would save a ton of energy, since you'd no longer need to burn gas to heat and use electricity to cool -- just flip a panel on your roof, and the temperature changes (although for heating, the house would need to be well enough insulated to last the night).
Ref: The Third Industrial Revolution by G. Harry Stine.
See CDT Water for one practical, functional application of aerogel.
In short, they push contaminated water through aerogel and use electrodes to pull ionic molecules apart. The ions get caught in the aerogel mesh, and the purified water flows through. At least, that's my layman's understanding of it.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Maybe I'm missing something, but elsewhere they said "But, Dr. Tsou said, the material was not used much, except in powdered form as a nontoxic anti-caking agent for food."
If it's so expensive, what kind of food exactly were they using it on? Caviar?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It might not be flexible, but it's very light. If it can catch dust flying at 14,000mph, surely this would be the perfect material for a bulletproof vest.
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
Thats easy, just use it to bring space viruses from the tails of comets back to earth.
Wait a minuite.....
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Try these guys (no, I don't have anything to do with them).
/Styx
If Aerogel is that good at insulation, screw the candel, i'll just rely on the body heat of myself and others :/
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
What I have not seen is the application in areas that weight would make a difference, cars, planes, and maybe even clothes.
In clothes, you can have the equivlent in a down jacket in the thinkness of a windbreaker. It would be light as a feature, and not be subject do damage by exteme normal wear.
Of course, everyone on
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The pictures are amazing. Wow. http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/photo/aerogel.html
A few years later, Kistler left the College of the Pacific and took a position with Monsanto Corp. Shortly thereafter, Monsanto began marketing a product known simply as "aerogel". Monsanto's Aerogel was a granular silica material. Little is known about the processing conditions used to make this material, but it is assumed that its production followed Kistler's procedures. Monsanto's Aerogel was used as an additive or a thixotropic agent in cosmetics and toothpastes. Very little new work on aerogels occurred throughout the next three decades. Eventually, in the 1960s, the development of inexpensive "fumed" silica undercut the market for aerogel, and Monsanto ceased production.
--- source
Is this substance edible, and if so can add artificial cherry flavoring without altering its' thermoinsulation properties? The Mac OS X spell checker does not recognize the word, "thermoinsulation", and yet NASA loves Macs. Go figure.
From article"and you could heat the house with a candle"
Does this mean you can now cool your house with an icecube?
"You could take a two or three bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle."
Well, sure, anybody can point out the obvious "if you have a crack in your house" stuff, but the idea is still valid. So, don't go pulling out pivnert from 10th grade chemistry and using that as your basis for second-guessing an illustrative statement.
However, your house would STILL get too hot, even using PV = nRT. V here is constant. R, of course, is the Rieberg constant, the value of which I don't know off-hand. As long as no air leaks out, then as T goes up, P goes up accordingly. But T is on an absolute scale. Kelvins, here. 293.15 K is room temperature, 20 degrees C, and if you heat that up to 30 degrees C, 303.15 K is, in terms of proportionality, not too much of an increase, but hotter than is comfortable, i.e. too hot. Then particles, due to the pressure differential between outside and inside, want to leak out that crack. And what's happened? THE TEMPERATURE HASN'T DECREASED. n in PV = nRT has gone down in order to bring P down to atmospheric pressure outside. Oh, dear, T is higher, and nothing's leaking out! This, silly head, is why it's possible to heat a house in the first place. By your reasoning, a house could never be a different temperature than outside! Which, thank goodness, isn't the case.
And then, of course, "as a matter of fact," the air is exactly what keeps it hot, and any other thermally insulative materials, i.e. fiberglass or aerogel. When you heat up a house, you run air into a furnace, heat it up, and then pump it through the rest of the house. A candle would heat up the air immediately above it (rising products from chemical reaction) and that air diffuses throughout the house, heating it up. Just like your furnace. True, there's radiative heating from the candle as well, but compare the difference in heat when you stick your finger an inch above a candle vs. an inch to the side of it. Radiative heating is universally dispersive. Convective goes straight up. BIG difference between the two there. Oh, well, it looks like a candle COULD heat up the house insulated with aerogel.
Yes, I am a physicist.
"Researchers at the University of New Mexico, lead by C. Jeff Brinker and Doug Smith, and at other institutions have become increasingly successful at eliminating the supercritical drying step used in aerogel production by chemically modifying the surface of the gel prior to drying. This work lead to the founding of Nanopore to commercialize lower-cost aerogels." ...
"Air molecules don't have room to vibrate"? In other words, their temperature magically drops to 0 Kelvin? What I think he is trying to say is they don't have room to convect. Molecules vibrate as a function of temperature. Even if the air molecule were chemically bonded to something, it would still vibrate as a function of temperature.
Powder is cheap, but the bulk aerogel made from it is a little bit of a trick.
Iron is pretty cheap too, but a single perfect crystal of appreciable size starts to make Platinum look positively affordable. Or graphite to diamond.
It's not so much the atoms that make many things expensive so much as how they're put together.
C'mon, anyone can tell that the picture was faked in a studio, it's obvious from the shadows cast by the so-called "aerogel". Just one more NASA conspiracy to convince us that they spend our tax dollars on worth subjects. Hrghmh.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Some awesome pictures;
"The Flower"
"Six Aerogel Nanocomposites"
"Magnetic Aerogel"
"Photoluminescent Silicon on Silica"
"Carbon Nanostructure in Aerogel"
General Info / Main
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
I recall that although it was extremely light, it fell quickly when I dropped it from hand to the other
Welcome to gravity, its pretty much the same for everybody on earth.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Anyvbody with some industry knowledge care to comment on the chances of the prices coming down? This material sounds like it would be phenomonal to help with insulation in industrial and domestic applications, do a world of good to sort out global warming. The byline about a candle heating a house seems a bit of hyperbole but if it's even in the same ballpark as this then imagine the savings people would make on heating / air conditioning.
Realistically, is it likely to become affordable? like teflon went from space product to saucepans? or is it like space travel (by the 1970s we'll all be travelling to the moon on our holidays for no more than the price of a holiday in Florida...)?
IR-invisibility cloak. Just wear it and be hidden from all IR eyes in the sky... neat.
"Aerogel": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a solid material happens to be so light, showing remarkable properties like near-perfect insulation, is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans.
I could care less, but not without a lobotomy
Could aerogel be formed with some other gas other than air, like pure hydrogen? Would it become lighter than air then and float around?
Just a thought, maybe some slashdotter knows, I've read the aerogel facts from the JPL page but it doesn't mention anything about this.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
I've found a "Silica aerogel photo gallery"
http://eande.lbl.gov/ECS/aerogels/saphoto.htm
Some of the pics are really amazing. Cool stuff!!!
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Aerogel is also used within particle physics for telling different types of particles apart in Cherenkov detectors.
In any transparent material particles will emit light in a cone around their trajectory when they are travelling faster than the speed of light in that material (analogous to sonic boom produced by plane going faster than speed of sound). From measuring the angle the light is emitted at we can work out the velocity. The range of velocities we are sensitive to depends on the refractive index of the material which is where aerogel comes into the game. We have gasses with refractive indices very close to one (n = 1.0005 for CF4) or glass with large refractive index (n=1.47 for quartz) but no normal material in between. Aerogel with a refractive index around 1.03 gives us new possibilities.
Within a particle physics experiment we can use a magnetic field to determine the momentum of a particle from the curvature of its trajectory. If we put this together with the measurement of its velocity from the Cherenkov detector we can work out the mass. This allows us to distinguish pions and kaons in an experiment like LHCb which is currently under construction. Here CF4 (gas), C4F10 (heavier gas) and aerogel are used to give coverage of a wide velocity range.
Sounds totally worthless to me. This stuff will probably end up having no practical value anywhere. That being said, anybody know where I can buy a small block?
For several years at Disneyland, they've had a sample of it in FutureLand or TomorrowLand or whatever it's called. Sort of across the path from Star Tours, there is a whole exhibit about the US Space Program. Inside a glass case, they have a square of Aerogel held up. Unfortunately, they don't let you touch it or anything. But it is interesting to look at - it's hard to find the edges of the material, even when you are concentrating.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
Ok, so if aerogel has the lowest density of any solid, what has the highest density?
Right now I'm thinking that it's either corporate America's CxO's, or perhaps whoever keeps watching all of these dumbass reality shows on tv.
You forgot to mention the reason for using Aerogels as Cherenkov detectors: they present very little mass, so low-mass particles will not interact and/or deposit much energy in them (e.g., for electrons the Aerogel will act only as a Cherenkov detector and not a calorimeter). The only other real alternative for getting indices of refraction barely over 1.0 is to use pressurized gases, which present a whole series of their own problems.
Diatomaceous earth is 100% natural microscopic glass shards. Being microscopic glass shards they are an excellent insecticide. The shards pierce the insect's shell and through capilarry action, they suck out all the internal fluids drying the bug to a corpse. However, the shards are so small that humans can ingest them without fear of harm.
So if you have a garden, or some veggies or other food you want to protect from insect pests without using a substance toxic to humans and pets, sprinkle on a little diatomaceous earth. Better yet mix up some garlic powder, water and diatomaceous earth in a bottle and spray it on. Garlic kills bugz too w/o being dangerous for ppl.
Eat at Joe's.
I think Mr. Kelley has done a masterful job describing modern day industrial design in terms and examples we can all relate to.
Thank you, Mr. Kelly.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
This means that you can theoretically heat or cool a house with just a painted square on the roof a few square meters in area, if you could just create a material of the right color.
:-)
Ummmmm... I'm afraid that at least with respect to heating, it's been done: glass is transparent in visible light but opaque at room-temperature black body radiation frequencies, aka infrared. It's called the greenhouse effect, and it heats my wintergarden just fine.
Another great patent idea lost to public-domain prior art - doh!
- nic
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
Here is a picture of wires in aerogels.
http://mrmac.mr.aps.anl.gov/~jterry/nano.html
Aerogel is cool stuff. I've recently been experimenting with aerogel capacitors. These suckers can hold a huge amount of energy. Right in front of me I have two 2.5V 50-farad (yes farads, not microfarads) capacitors.
Fun for robotic projects and such. Many common devices are using super-capacitors like these. Those tiny remote control cars and those battery-free flashlights are a couple examples.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
You can already get windows (and transparent walls) from Kalwall that provide up to R-20 insulation. They use a form of aerogel called Nanogel , which is manufactured in Germany by Cabot (not like the cheese). The granular aerogel is packed between two translucent panes to form a structural panel.
The newsletter I work for wrote an article about it a couple of years ago. The article explains the insulation properties this way:
Some other fun facts:Aerogel coffee mug.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I believe that the density is measured by the volume of the cube divided by the mass of the cube. (In many cases it's also motioned that 98.8% of an aerogel is empty space.) But keep in mind that the truly remarkable feature about this is the scale at which this occurs.
The framework that makes up an aerogel is so fine that the individual components are around 3-5 nanometers in thickness. (An atom is about 0.1nm).
In your aluminum example the average density of the space defined by the cube would be less dense. But the foil that makes up its walls is easily discernable from the air. It might be easier to think of an aerogel like a sponge, or angel food cake where there are tunnels of air (or empty space if you'd rather) in the material. But in the case of the aeogel the tunnel are microscopically small complex in shape.
..of ships and shoes and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.