Aerogel is the lightest solid material on the planet, up to 99.98% of its volume can be pure air. It insulates space suits and could be used one day to clean up oil spills. And I’ve just discovered you can make it at home!
Here is an article about a 10 year old boy making aerogel for a science fair back in 2003. It points to an outdated link for the silicon based recipe, but you can find this via the Microstructured Materials Group here and also via this fact sheet courtesy of the Canberra Space Centre.
Other interesting reading I have found is a paper written by artist Dr. Ioannis MICHALOU(di)S, who collaborated with scientists and engineers at MIT to produce a series of sculptures made from aerogel.
Here is a short video with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Alex Gash talking about the properties of aerogel.
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One Response to “aerogel”
Mike
1 week ago
That bouncy ball roughly 37 seconds into the video convinced me: I MUST try to make some!