Aerogel

 

What is Aerogel?


‘Aerogel’ is a broad term used to talk about an extraordinary group of materials that have been used since the 1960s in space travel, but are now finding uses across a whole range of industries. ‘Aerogel’ is not a specific mineral or material with a set chemical formula-rather, the term is used to encompass all materials with a specific geometrical structure. This structure is an extremely porous, solid foam, with high connectivity between branched structures of a few nanometres across.Though aerogel is technically a foam, it can take many different shapes and forms. The majority of aerogel is composed of silica, but carbon, iron oxide, organic polymers, semiconductor nanostructures, gold and copper can also form aerogel. However, within the aerogel structure, very little is solid material, with up to 99.8% of the structure consisting of nothing but air. This unique composition gives aerogel an almost ghostly appearance; hence it is often referred to as ‘frozen smoke’.One of the best known and most useful physical properties of aerogel is its incredible lightness-it typically has a density between 0.0011 to 0.5 g cm-3, with a typical average of around 0.020 g cm-3. This means that aerogel is usually only 15 times heavier than air, and has been produced at a density of only 3 times that of air. It is so light, that if Michelangelo’s David was constructed from aerogel, it would weigh about the same as a bag of sugar! For many years, aerogel was in the Guinness book of world records as the ‘solid with the lowest density’, before being ousted recently by the metallic microlattice and then aerographite.

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