Light almost like air, airgel is a powerful solution for everything, from the windows leaking heat to carbon dioxide emissions.
In 1930, American chemist Samuel Kistler produced the world's lightest solid material. He managed to do this, carefully removing the liquid from the silica gel, leaving a nanometer-scale holes for easy-eaten skeleton. Composed of 99 percent of the air, it reminded cured smoke. Kistler called them "Aerogel.
Aerogel for many years been seen as a curiosity: the extreme fragility of limited potential. However, over the last decade, things have begun to change. Chemists airgel reinforced with glass fiber and impregnavo thin polymer chains, providing a flexible airgel. NASO'os Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, the team created a flexible polymer airgel revealed last month as rubber and 500 times stronger than the original Kistler.
Lightning expanding application areas. Home front, the weather detained Aerogel insulation makes a superstar: 1 cm to 5 cm is sufficient to replace the foam with good insulation. Transparent windows with airgel eco buildings retain heat better than traditional double glazing, weighing much less. High levels of winter clothing airgel used more widely, and the Google Nexus 7 tablet used plastic lids Aerogel weighs twice as less than normal.
But a new type of airgel will probably be revolutionary. Metal nano foam is metallic atoms instead of silicon dioxide or plastic frame. Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico'e team accidentally discovered a simple method of their production in 2005. Facilitating certain transition metal alloy pieces, they got interesting in the airgel-like structure.
Although the insulation is useless, nano metal foams are intriguing large surface area - up to 3000 m² / g - electrical conductivity and chemical activity of the combination. Above all, these features can provide a radical new way to clean up power generation. Chemically active iron or nickel frames could, for example, reducing the catalytic converters used in precious metals such as platinum levels.
Vacuum and ride
Meanwhile nanoputos Beryllium is a lightweight structure that can retain up to 10% of its weight of hydrogen. Other hydrogen storage materials, such as metal hydrides can keep more, but they liberate hydrogen only at high temperatures, "says Fedor Naumkin University of Ontario Institute of Technology Oshawa'oje, Canada, who worked with the foam. This nano-foam could provide an advantage for hydrogen storage, for example, hydrogen-powered vehicles (The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, vol 115, p 12105).
This year, Brown University Providence'e, Rhode'o island team also found evidence indicating that the catalytic nano-copper foam can help create a new, inexpensive way to pump carbon dioxide from the air, thus producing the required hydrocarbon industry (ACS Catalysis, Vol 4 , p 3091). If you do not remember the trials of more normal use of airgel as ultra-absorbing chemical pollutants in the environment cleaning cloth, stiff smoke can provide a cleaner world.
