The Amazing Properties of Aerogel

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The Amazing Properties of Aerogel

Posted by michael on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @06:39PM from the it-slices-it-dices dept.

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.

20 of 556 comments (clear)

The house would warm up by ObviousGuy · 2004-01-20 18:42 · Score: 5, Funny

If you goddamn kids would close the goddamn door!

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also known as...... by noelo · 2004-01-20 18:45 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
Aerogel Facts and a Picture by dekashizl · 2004-01-20 18:45 · Score: 5, Interesting
Some facts, from JPL Aerogel site:
- 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.

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1. Re:Aerogel Facts and a Picture by deglr6328 · 2004-01-20 19:40 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  It's interesting that Aerogel is always mentioned as being the insulator on the mars Sojourner Rover (and current mars rovers) but it's almost never mentioned that the heat source inside the insulated electronics boxes is not merely waste resistive heating from the electronic components themselves, but from Plutonium Radioisotope Heater Units of a couple ounces each. Maybe it's a good thing they're kept low profile, the clueless luddites would have a field day.
  
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balsa wood in the right structure can do as much.. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-20 18:46 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Aerogel FAQ by dekashizl · 2004-01-20 18:47 · Score: 5, Informative

Very good Aerogel FAQ.

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For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
(AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History.
Re:R-factor? by dekashizl · 2004-01-20 18:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

Not sure if all Aerogels are created equally, but this is from 1999 NASA article on Aerogel:
"A single one-inch thick windowpane of silica aerogel is equivalent to the insulation provided by 20 windowpanes of glass (R-20 insulation factor)."

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For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
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my god... by ruebarb · 2004-01-20 18:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

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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1. Re:my god... by Znork · 2004-01-20 22:07 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  "Imagine if your house were perfectly insulated, then you would only need to suck out the heat added by the things inside it (200W per person, another 200W per computer)."
  
  Well, and the CO2. And the water vapour. And whatever toxics that leak in miniscule amounts from materials inside.
  
  You dont have to imagine it, it's been tried. It was found to profoundly suck, as people got sick and the houses molded or rotted.
  
  The technology for building houses with perfect insulation has been here for a long time. Unfortunately, the problem isnt the insulation anymore, the problem is the ventilation. But come up with a highly efficient and cheap heat exchanger system and you could solve that too :).
Re:balsa wood in the right structure can do as muc by Quixote · 2004-01-20 18:59 · Score: 5, Interesting

Here is brick-on-aerogel picture. Looks quite cool.
Photos by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-20 19:01 · Score: 5, Interesting

Some cool shots.
What people don't know about aerogel by state*less · 2004-01-20 19:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

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
Re:Some more info by teneighty · 2004-01-20 19:09 · Score: 5, Informative

This informative comment was lifted from a comment made the last time aerogels were discussed on slashdot (see the original comment here).
more on aerogel by movefaster · 2004-01-20 19:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

I have a friend who works on this. Here is a NASA newspaper article on her work; here is her website, showing aerogel in many different configurations. If you want to know more about it, you could always drop her a line.
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.
Practical Application by aiken_d · 2004-01-20 19:36 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

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Re:Amazing stuff... by gnomepro · 2004-01-20 19:53 · Score: 5, Informative

The pictures are amazing. Wow. http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/photo/aerogel.html
Re:a candle? that IS correct! by Gewis · 2004-01-20 20:15 · Score: 5, Informative

"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.
Re:Too much by Eivind · 2004-01-20 21:45 · Score: 5, Informative

Vacuum is *not* actually the perfect insulator. It is true that no heat is conducted trough vacuum, but on the other hand vacuum is near perfect in letting heat *radiate*. Now, if you combine vacuum with one or more reflective films to reflect back most of the radiated heat then you have eh, uhm, invented the termos-bottle.
Re:Too much by waitigetit · 2004-01-21 00:12 · Score: 5, Funny

Diamond is usually made from carbon, same stuff graphite is made from, but in a different configuration. So, in theory, if you rub it against paper, it should leave a mark.

I should have known this before I proposed to my girlfriend.

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Re:I wonder by SpotWeld · 2004-01-21 01:06 · Score: 5, Informative

The short answer is that yes it could, but only temporarily.

I believe Aerogel is an open celled matrix, meaning that the eventually the hydrogen (especially hydrogen) would leak out causing a block of the stuff to return to the ground.

I suppose it would be possible to seal a block of aerogel in some sort of polymer making for a structurally solid balloon.

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