AeroGel - WFP Material Potential

Aerogel (also called 'frozen smoke' because of its hazy blue appearance), is a truly remarkable material. It is the lightest and lowest-density solid known to exist.

Do you remember this blog? I think Aerogel may have an edge! Being the world's lightest known solid, it weighs only three times that of air. Combined with a carbon fiber lattice & investment, I can see water fed poles getting lighter & higher. Already Dunlop has incorporated aerogel into the mold of its new series of tennis racquets, and has previously used it in squash racquets. The high aspect ratio of fibers such as fiberglass have been used to reinforce aerogel composites with significantly improved mechanical properties. This futuristic material may just be a leap in the direction of making all wfp's lighter & easier to control & if you feel up to it - you can just make your own. Just don't go out working in a strong wind!

A Solid That's Light as Air: Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory focused on aerogel -- an extremely lightweight, porous material that is chemically identical to glass, but weighs only a little more than air. Aerogel is the lightest solid known to science. It's also one of the most insulating materials on Earth, the most porous, and it's nearly transparent. Holding a piece of aerogel is an uncanny experience. It's so light it feels nearly weightless, like a chunk of solidified fog or smoke. It feels a bit like Styrofoam, and it squeaks when you rub your finger on it. It's strong enough to support many times its own weight if the load is distributed evenly. But bend it or squeeze it too hard, as one Wired News editor discovered, and a chunk of aerogel will shatter into tiny fragments.

Aerogel-impregnated fabrics from Aspen Aerogels are flexible enough to be rolled up or incorporated into clothing.

Back on Earth, that porousness (aerogel can be up to 99-percent air) makes aerogel an ideal thermal insulator. So it's no surprise that companies are investigating commercial uses for this material, ranging from windows to home insulation to clothing. Such a wealth of useful properties makes aerogel interesting not only to rocket scientists, but to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, who sunk $50 million last year into Aspen Aerogels, a company devoted to commercializing aerogel. "As an insulator, aerogel is two to four times more efficient than anything else out there," said George Gould, the director of research for Aspen Aerogels.

Aspen Aerogels makes economical aerogel textiles by impregnating "blankets" of fabric with silica gel, then pressurizing the impregnated fabric and extracting the now-supercritical liquid. The result is a flexible fabric with aerogel integrated into its matrix. Prices for the material vary, but a typical price is a few dollars per square foot for quarter-inch thick material. When Aspen Aerogel's second factory is completed later this year, Gould said, the company will be able to produce 100 million square feet per year of its aerogel textiles, bringing costs even lower. Aspen's products have been used to to insulate the pipelines used in deep-sea oil drilling operations, in winter jackets by Burton Snowboards and even to make shoe inserts.

The Flower, the Mona Lisa of aerogel pictures, dramatically demonstrates the superinsulating properties of silica aerogel by insulating a delicate, moist flower from the raging heat of a Bunsen burner.

Other commercial producers of Aerogel include Aerogel Composite and a Swedish company, Airglass, which sells aerogel-based insulated windows. The problem these companies face is that, while aerogel is a vastly superior insulator, the alternatives (like fiberglass or plain glass windows) are dirt-cheap. The high pressure needed to create aerogel (around 800 pounds per square inch) means that producing even a tiny amount requires costly lab equipment. You can buy aerogel samples on eBay but they cost around $30 to $50 for small, nickel-sized chunks.

That means aerogel is unlikely to play a major role in construction or clothing unless its makers can bring the price down much further -- or capitalize on its space-age reputation enough to make customers willing to pay extra for cachet. "The costs are not necessarily prohibitive," said Gould. "Relative to something like fiberglass, the costs are certainly greater but a lot of it has to do with capacity."

Aerogel (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Aerogel is a synthetic porous ultralight material derived from a gel, in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. The result is a solid with extremely low density and thermal conductivity. It is nicknamed frozen smoke, solid smoke, solid air or blue smoke owing to its translucent nature and the way light scatters in the material; however, it feels like expanded polystyrene (styrofoam) to the touch.

Aerogel was first created by Samuel Stephens Kistler in 1931, as a result of a bet with Charles Learned over who could replace the liquid in "jellies" with gas without causing shrinkage. Aerogels are produced by extracting the liquid component of a gel through supercritical drying. This allows the liquid to be slowly dryed off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse from capillary action, as would happen with conventional evaporation. The first aerogels were produced from silica gels. Kistler's later work involved aerogels based on alumina, chromia and tin dioxide. Carbon aerogels were first developed in the late 1980s.

Peter Tsou with a sample of aerogel at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.

Despite their name, aerogels are solid, rigid, and dry materials and do not resemble a gel in their physical properties; the name comes from the fact that they are derived(composed) from gels. Pressing softly on an aerogel typically does not leave even a minor mark; pressing more firmly will leave a permanent depression. Pressing extremely firmly enough will cause a catastrophic breakdown in the sparse structure, causing it to shatter like glass – a property known as friability; although more modern variations do not suffer from this. Despite the fact that it is prone to shattering, it is very strong structurally. Its impressive load bearing abilities are due to the dendritic microstructure, in which spherical particles of average size 2–5 nm are fused together into clusters. These clusters form a three-dimensional highly porous structure of almost fractal chains, with pores just under 100 nm. The average size and density of the pores can be controlled during the manufacturing process.

A 2.5 kg brick is supported by a piece of aerogel with a mass of only 2 grams.

Aerogels are good thermal insulators because they almost nullify the three methods of heat transfer (convection, conduction, and radiation). They are good conductive insulators because they are composed almost entirely from a gas, and gases are very poor heat conductors. Silica aerogel is especially good because silica is also a poor conductor of heat (a metallic aerogel, on the other hand, would be less effective). They are good convective inhibitors because air cannot circulate through the lattice. Owing to its hygroscopic nature, aerogel feels dry and acts as a strong desiccant. Persons handling aerogel for extended periods should wear gloves to prevent the appearance of dry brittle spots on their skin.

The slight color it does have is due to Rayleigh scattering of the shorter wavelengths of visible light by the nanosized dendritic structure. This causes it to appear smoky blue against dark backgrounds and yellowish against bright backgrounds. Aerogels by themselves are hydrophilic, but chemical treatment can make them hydrophobic. If they absorb moisture they usually suffer a structural change, such as contraction, and deteriorate, but degradation can be prevented by making them hydrophobic. Aerogels with hydrophobic interiors are less susceptible to degradation than aerogels with only an outer hydrophobic layer, even if a crack penetrates the surface. Hydrophobic treatment facilitates processing because it allows the use of a water jet cutter.

World's Lightest Material - Maybe Your Next WFP?

Your next Waterfed Pole could be made from this. As it stands, it is already very similar.

World’s Lightest Material Developed: Washington, Nov 19 (TruthDive): Scientists claim to have created the world’s lightest solid material so light that even a feathery dandelion can comfortably hold its weight without having its little fluffy seeds mashed. A team of researchers from UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology have developed the material with a density of 0.9 mg/cc.

The substance is made of tiny hollow metallic tubes – the walls of which are 1,000 times thinner than those of a human hair – arranged into a criss-crossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between them. It has a unique “micro-lattice” cellular architecture. The secret to its lightness is a cellular architecture fabricated from hollow tubes that supports a material structure that is in reality 99.99 per cent air, according to the research team that built it.

That means the material’s density is less than one-thousandth that of water. And the stuff is pretty resilient as well—researchers said that when squashed to half its height, the material rebounds 98 per cent of the way back. “The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair,” lead author Tobias Shandler of HRL said.

Bill Carter, manager of the architected materials group at HRL, said that to understand the structure of the material, it can be compared with either the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Golden Gate Bridge over San Francisco Bay. Like each of them, the material is light and weight-efficient, but on a Nano scale.

The material seen in the picture above is made out of 90 percent nickel. According to Carter, however, it can be made out of other metals as well — the nickel version was just the easiest to make, the report stated. The first time the stress test was carried out and repeated the material became less stiff and strong, but the team says that further compressions made very little difference. “Materials actually get stronger as the dimensions are reduced to the nanoscale,” said team member Lorenzo Valdevit.

According to the scientists, the material, extraordinarily strong and shock-absorbent, is like a feather. It floats down, and its terminal velocity depends on the density. When dropped from shoulder height, it takes more than 10 seconds to touch the ground.

United States Engineers Reveal World’s “Lightest Material” - A team of engineers from the U.S. claim to have produced the world’s lightest material. The material is composed of tiny hollow metallic tubes that are organized into a micro-lattice – a criss-cross pattern with small open spaces between the tubes. The scientists claim that the material is about 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and boasts “extraordinarily high energy absorption” properties. Some of the possible uses for such a material include a new generation of batteries and shock absorbers.

Producing the “Ultra Light” Material: The research was conducted at the University of California, Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology and will be published in the newest edition of Science. "The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," noted lead author Dr. Tobias Schaedler. The produced material has a density of around 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimeter. Just to compare, the density of silica aerogels – the world’s lightest solid materials – is only as low as 1.0mg per cubic cm.

The metallic micro-lattices have the advantage since they are composed of 99.99% air and 0.01% solids. The engineers say that the material’s strength lies in the ordered nature of its lattice design. Other ultra light substances, including aerogels and metallic foams, have random cellular structures; meaning that they are more flexible, strong and absorb more energy than most of the raw materials that they are composed of. William Carter, manager of architected materials at HRL, drew a likeness between the new material and larger low-density structures. "Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architecture," he commented.

"We are revolutionizing lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the nano and micro scales." To analyze the power of the metallic micro-lattices the team compressed them until they had only half of their original width. After taking away the load, the substance recovered 98% of its original height and took on its original shape. The first time that the stress test was conducted and repeated the material loss some of its stiffness and strength, but the engineers noted that further compressions didn’t make much of a difference. "Materials actually get stronger as the dimensions are reduced to the nanoscale," said team member Lorenzo Valdevit."Combine this with the possibility of tailoring the architecture of the micro-lattice and you have a unique cellular material."