New Ultralight Ceramic Aerogel Can Handle Even Extreme Temperatures

If you are looking for a material to use in Hell a ceramic aerogel might be what you need. 1400°C for a week? No problem! Switching between -198°C and 900°C hundreds of times? Again, no problem!

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Some materials make you stop just watch in awe. One such miraculous material is a new ceramic aerogel made by a team from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and several other research institutions. It’s extremely light yet extremely tough. In the future, we might see it used in space missions because that is the exact combination of qualities liked by rocket engineers.

Ceramic aerogels aren’t really that new. Actually, they have been used to insulate industrial devices since the nineties and they have found their place even in space, for example as insulation of scientific devices on board American rovers that can be found on Mars. But the new aerogel is a “superaerogel” compared to them. It’s much lighter yet much more durable against extreme temperatures. Plus, thanks to its unique structure it is pretty flexible for an aerogel. Another interesting property of the new aerogel is the fact that it actually shrinks when warmed up.

All of this combined makes the new aerogel much more durable and less fragile compared to the current ceramic aerogels. You can compress it to just 5 % of its original size and it will still return to its original shape.

The new aerogel’s structure is made from a thin layer of boron nitride with atoms connected into a hexagonal pattern. This material is capable of handling real extremes. Hundreds of cycles of extreme temperature changes, from -198°C (-324.4°F) to 900°C (1652°F) all within just a few seconds. In another test, the aerogel managed to survive almost completely without damage for a week in 1400°C (2552°F). The inner structure is the key to the new material amazing properties as it is capable of dampening the shocks caused by the extreme temperatures and their fast changes.

Sources:

• http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6428/723
• https://phys.org/news/2019-02-ultra-lightweight-ceramic-material-extreme-temperatures.html

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