Monday, March 24, 2014

AeroGel



TECHNO CHILLS                               

Aero Gel







Aerogel


Aerogel
  

Aerogel
           

 HORRY CLAP!

Aerogel material—often referred to as frozen smoke, solid smoke, solid air or blue smoke—is actually, like all the best things, the result of a wager. It was first created by Samuel Stephens Kistler in 1931, after he bet Charles Learned that he could replace the liquid in a jelly with gas, without causing shrinkage. Turned out, he was right!

To produce an aerogel, you take a normal gel and then—very slowly and carefully—remove the liquid, leaving behind just the solid structure. That process varies depending on the gel in question, but invariably requires some complex chemistry to facilitate removal of the liquid by supercritical drying, which carefully avoids the liquid-gas transition by using pressure and temperature variation to go from liquid to solid to gas instead. Otherwise, the evaporation process can destroy the structure. The result is a substance that looks like the original gel but feels like expanded polystyrene to the touch.

And the material properties! Oh, the material properties. Just look at what it can do.




DIBS: Since any patent on this 70 year old process must be expired, I am filing for one as we speak.  I will then begin manufacture of the Aerogel Mini.

Weight: 1 gram
Fuel: Four AA Batteries
Further projections, such as 0-60 and top speed would be premature.


Since he found it for me, cuzzin ricky is Senior Optimization Developer
       


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6 comments:

toadold said...

Looks like it would be easy to make on the moon or in orbit....of course the price getting their would be expensive but returning it to earth would be cheap.

Anonymous said...

All I know is that is one helluva long zipper on that gal.
olds-mo-william

TimO said...

NASA used blocks of aerogel as traps and brought back dust grains from the formation of the Solar System: http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2014/03/spacecraft-returns-seven-particles-birth-solar-system

iri said...

Hell, I can do that with a handy wipe on my birth certificate.

Anonymous said...

Hey iri,
At least you have a birth certificate!

BHO

C. Blake Powers said...

We used to work with that on the commercial side of the house at NASA. It has a lot of interesting properties, but while it has a lot of strength in one dimension, it is brittle and doesn't handle shear and other forces well. In other words, in normal use it can and does often turn to dust. It's a pity that a lot of the research got dropped, as if some of the problems with it are worked out, it would revolutionize insulation, power cells, and more. Check the MSFC site and/or science.nasa.gov (if still in existence) for some good articles on it.

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