Sunday, April 29, 2012
AEROGEL post by Challyn Bentson
The supercritical drying of liquid gels of alumina, chromia,
tin oxide, or carbon creates a material called aerogel. It is sometimes called
frozen smoke because of its transparency. It has an unbelievably large internal
surface area. In the Guinness Book of World Records, this material was named
both the lowest density solid and the best insulator. I discovered that the
reason aerogel is such a good insulator is because it is composed almost
completely of gas, which is a poor heat conductor. When I first started looking
into this material, my initial thought was to implement it in the military as
some kind of armor. However, I learned that despite its amazing heat resistance
and strong structure, it is prone to shattering if too much pressure is
applied. My next thought was to use this material to insulate houses. Aerogel
provides 39 times more insulation than fiberglass insulation. It is more
expensive than other house insulation, but it would allow people to save money
on heating and cooling expenses. The only time the heat would need to be
adjusted is when a door or window opens. I think this material is amazing, and
if it’s production keeps advancing it may wind up insulating everyone’s home!
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Being engineers, I get excited about reading about new materials being discovered and we might be working with them very soon but call me old school, I am hesitant in using them. Even though, this gas might be used in homes for insulation purposes, I am not sure about the constituents of this gas. Alumina, chromia, tin oxide must not be harmful to humans and essentially, not to have any side effects. What would be done during winters since it is a poor heat conductor?
ReplyDeleteI read that lighting one candle would be enough to warm an entire house since the heat would not escape. I'm not sure how true that is, but I'm sure it would require a lot less time to run the heater in your home.
ReplyDeleteChallyn Bentson
Air makes for an excellent insulator, so long as it is not moving. Once convection comes into play the heat transfer increases drastically. Fiberglass insulation is so effective because it traps air and keeps it immobile, which is why if you compress fiberglass insulation it becomes much less effective (because the insulating air is no longer there). This aerogel would allow for much more compact insulation. Very cool.
ReplyDeleteAerogel is an awesome concept, but its painfully fragile. It doesn't take much of an impact in the walls to ruin the whole room's insulation. Surely I'm not the only guy who, as a toddler, took a hammer to the drywall? Except in my case, the insulation was not affected, so that wasn't a factor when fixing up the numerous holes. For aerogel, you'd have to take that into account. So it could save money from heating costs, but it may or may not even out just keeping the insulation maintained.
ReplyDeleteI believe what makes aerogel such a good insulator is that the gas inside the pores of the material is stagnant. Heated gas normally causes a convection current with cooler gasses. It's use in houses would be great, but expensive. ON problem it doesn't address is that most of the heat escapes through doors and windows. Doors could have a layer of this inside, but windows can have a thin layer of air in between 2 sheets of glass. You can't put aerogel in there because that defeats the purpose of a window. It's very expensive to make too and it doesn't exactly solve the home insulating problem.
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