Washington, August 20 (ANI): A major improvement in the world's lightest solid material and best solid insulating material could lead to a new genre of super-insulating clothing, refrigerators with thinner walls that hold more food and improved spacesuits.
Scientists have reported the development of a new flexible "aerogel" stuff so light that it has been called "solid smoke."
Mary Ann B. Meador, Ph.D., explained that traditional aerogels, developed decades ago and made from silica, found in beach sand, are brittle, and break and crumble easily.
Scientists have improved the strength of aerogels over the years, and Meador described one of these muscled-up materials developed with colleagues at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
"The new aerogels are up to 500 times stronger than their silica counterparts," Meador said.
"A thick piece actually can support the weight of a car. And they can be produced in a thin form, a film so flexible that a wide variety of commercial and industrial uses are possible," she explained.
Flexible aerogels, for instance, could be used in a new genre of super-insulating clothing that keeps people warm in the cold with less bulk than traditional "thermal" garments. Tents and sleeping bags would have the same advantages.
Home refrigerator and freezer walls insulated with other forms of the material would shrink in thickness, increasing storage capacity.
Meador said that the aerogel is 5-10 times more efficient than existing insulation, with a quarter-inch-thick sheet providing as much insulation as 3 inches of fiberglass. And there could be multiple applications in thin-but-high-efficiency insulation for buildings, pipes, water heater tanks and other devices.
NASA envisions one use in an advanced re-entry system for spacecraft returning to Earth from the International Space Station, and perhaps other missions.
Re-entry vehicles need a heat shield that keeps them from burning up due to frictional heating from Earth's atmosphere. Those shields can be bulky and heavy. So NASA is exploring use of a heat shield made from flexible aerogel that inflates like a balloon when spacecraft enter the atmosphere.
Meador said the material also could be used to insulate spacesuits.
The scientist reported the development at the 244th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. (ANI)
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