
Qingkun Liu, a posdoctoral researcher in physics, lifts up a petri dish holding samples of a new aerogel. (Credit: CU Boulder)
Can a new type of transparent gel, made from readily-available beer waste, help engineers build greenhouses on Mars?
CU Boulder physicists have developed an insulating gel that they say could coat the windows of habitats in space, allowing the settlers inside to trap and store energy from the sun—much like a greenhouse stays warm during the winter. And unlike similar products on the market, the material is mostly see-through.
“Transparency is an enabling feature because you can use this gel in windows, and you could use it in extraterrestrial habitats,” said Ivan Smalyukh, a professor in the Department of Physics. “You could harvest sunlight through that thermally insulating material and store the energy inside, protecting yourself from those big oscillations in temperature that you have on Mars or on the moon.”
The defining feature of aerogels, as their name suggests, is air, Smalyukh explained. By weight, these thin films are 90 percent gas. Engineers achieve this feather weight by generating crisscrossing patterns of solid material that trap air inside billions of tiny pores, similar to the bubbles in bubble wrap. It’s that trapping capacity that makes them such good insulators.
“You create a very tortuous network of these nanoparticles that link together in the aerogel, preventing the heat from going through,” Smalyukh said.
Beer to windows
That same network, however, tends to scatter light, making aerogels look cloudy and explaining why some engineers call them “frozen smoke.”
To make a more translucent gel, Smalyukh and his colleagues begin with the common plant sugar cellulose. By carefully controlling how cellulose molecules link up, the team is able to orient them into a lattice-like pattern.
That pattern is so uniform, he said, that it allows light to pass through unbothered, giving the gel its transparent appearance.
Problem solved. In order to find a ready supply of cellulose for their space-age material, the researchers turned to a substance with humble beginnings: a refreshing IPA.
Unused beer wort, or waste liquid produced during the brewing process, can make cellulose when scientists add in specialized bacteria. The researchers began driving to breweries across the Boulder area to collect tubs of unwanted liquid from beer-makers.
“So not only are we recycling and saving this valuable material from entering the landfill, but we’re also producing this raw material cheaply,” said Andrew Hess, a Ph.D. student in physics at CU Boulder.
Currently, it takes the team about two weeks to culture the cellulose, but the rest of the process of making the aerogel moves quickly. The final product of the team’s efforts is a thin, flexible film that is roughly 100 times lighter than glass. This gel is so resistant to heat that you could put a strip of it on your hand and light a fire on top—without feeling a thing.
Mars to Antarctica
While the researchers have their eye on putting this material on space habitats, more immediate applications are already available on Earth.
Most windows are poor insulators. According to the Department of Energy, roughly one-quarter of the energy that is expended to heat and cool buildings in the United States goes toward offsetting the loss of heat through windows, potentially costing building operators billions of dollars per year.
Covering glass in sheets of the aerogel, however, could dramatically slow down the loss of heat, said Hess, who also leads the project’s tech-to-market transfer work. And you wouldn’t have to replace the windows in the process.
“Windows are incredibly expensive to replace,” Hess said. “We’re envisioning a retrofitting product that would basically be a peel-and-stick film that a consumer would buy at Home Depot.”
On a larger scale, cities could use the gel to retrofit windows on skyscrapers, dramatically increasing energy efficiency.
To get to that point, the researchers say that they would need to learn how to produce more aerogel faster. But they’re already moving forward on that goal. Smalyukh’s team has been exploring partnerships with window manufacturing companies.
Earlier this summer, they won NASA’s 2018 iTech competition, a national contest that seeks out Earth-bound technologies that might one day help people travel to space. The team’s research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
“Our approach so far has been around windows,” Hess said. “However, we also see our technology being enabling for so many other applications, including smart clothes, for insulating cars and protecting firefighters.”
And there are more fanciful uses, too. Smalyukh said that one afternoon, his lab got a visit from the young daughter of one of his team members. For fun, the researchers coated her hand in the non-toxic aerogel, giving her a crystal-clear and flexible glove. That inspired Smalyukh to think about using aerogels to make clothing that would be both ultra-warm and transparent.
“This opens your imagination,” he said. “We were joking about going to the South Pole and doing a group outing with penguins. You could sun tan on top of the ice.”
The Latest on: Aerogel
via Google News
The Latest on: Aerogel
- New smart aerogel extracts water from air without needing poweron January 20, 2021 at 5:47 am
Researchers from the National University of Singapore have created a new substance able to extract water from air without needing external power. The substance is a smart aerogel that could be ...
- Sponge-like aerogel turns airborne vapor into drinkable wateron January 19, 2021 at 5:26 pm
Water security is a significant problem and pulling it out of the air, as fanciful as that may sound, is shaping as a potential part of the solution. A team from the National University of Singapore ...
- Global Silica Aerogel Market 2020 Growth, Trend, Analysis, Future Opportunities and Industry Forecast to 2025on January 19, 2021 at 2:20 pm
Global Silica Aerogel Market 2020 by Manufacturers, Type and Application, Forecast to 2025 introduced by MarketsandResearch.biz offers exclusive research & analysis on the market that gives analysis ...
- Engineers create 'smart' aerogel that turns air into drinking wateron January 19, 2021 at 6:17 am
Some say future wars will be fought over water, and a billion people around the world are already struggling to find enough water to live. Now, researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS ...
- NUS creates aerogel that converts air into drinking wateron January 18, 2021 at 11:19 pm
The National University of Singapore (NUS) announced that it has created a type of aerogel, which can extract drinking water from air without any external power source. The NUS researchers published ...
- Aerogel Market, Driven by Industry Analysis, Growth, Size, COVID-19 Overview, Opportunities, Share 2023on January 18, 2021 at 5:53 pm
Some of the major companies in the global aerogel market include BASF SE, Cabot Corporation, Aspen Aerogels, Inc., Aerogel Technologies, LLC, Guangdong Zhaoqing L & V Co. Ltd., Nano High-Tech Co ...
- Making Aerogel, It’s Not For The Faint-Heartedon January 18, 2021 at 4:00 pm
Aerogel — that mixture of air and silica — is one of those materials that seems like a miracle. It is almost not there since the material is 99% air. [NileRed] wanted to make his own and he ...
- Aerogel Market, Driven by Industry Analysis, Growth, Size, COVID-19 Overview, Opportunities, Share 2023on January 18, 2021 at 12:41 am
Aerogels are fabricated from isolating the fluid segment by a supercritical drying process. They are porous and strong ...
- NUS engineers create 'smart' aerogel that turns air into drinking wateron January 17, 2021 at 9:00 pm
Researchers from NUS Engineering have developed a new aerogel that autonomously absorbs water from the atmosphere and then releases it effortlessly without any external power source. This invention is ...
via Bing News