Aerogel, the Insulation Material of the Future

Aerogels are a diverse class of solid materials that exhibit many extreme properties. For example, the lowest density solid materials that have ever been produced are all Aerogels. It's known that silicia Aerogel weights only three times as much as air. We would need about 150 brick sized pieces of Aerogel to outweight a gallon of water.

And yes, even this can be outperformed if we evacuate the air out of its pores. This way it could become even lighter than air. Ok, they already did something simmilar and produced Aerogel lighter than air, called SEAgel.

I wonder if we could finally build flying cars out of this, would be about time. Some types of Aerogels are excellent thermal insulators and electrical insulators. Aerogels can usually hold a gently applied load of up to 2,000 times their weight and sometimes more. But that's easy to achieve sice they are one of the lightest materials known to us.

Because of its extreme properties, Aerogel can be used for many purposes. Well, first of all scientists had to discover how to produce Aerogel without blowing the production place up, and believe me, they had many unsuccessful tries.

After that problem was solved, they began using Aerogels for many things, such as:

• Wetsuits
• Firefighter suits
• Skylights
• Windows
• Rockets
• Paints
• Cosmetics
• Nuclear weapons

It supposedly was used as an insulator in shoes and clothing for people who were brave (or stupid) enough to try and climb the highest peaks in the world, but they had to abandon that idea cause of overheating. You read right, people who were climbing the highest and coldest places on earth were overheating because of their special clothing and their own body heat.

So it's a no brainer that Aerogel is used as a home insulator. There already are companies, that offer such insulation, but they are still very expensive. But the good news, you may have to pay very much for an Aerogel insulation on hard to insulate areas like windows, but on the long run, it can save you up to $750 per year.

It is still expensive to produce Aerogel but hey, at least they don't blow the factory up during production anymore. There are countless uses for it.

Whether its protecting tanks to flubbing clothing lines (though you could say it is more Mr. Boss' fault) to showing up in collectors bins, Aerogel is no doubt one of the coolest dog-gone things to come around in a while.

To say, "What took so long?!" would be an understatement, but as tales of the benefits of Aerogel are spread, I would expect great things will come from this humble substance.