Aerogel Filled Glazing
Aerogel filled glazing speaks to what is aerogel filled glazing, why use aerogel filled glazing.
It is a silicon based foam that is 99.8 percent air and can be used to fill the cavity in double glazed glass or plastic products.
Though aerogel was invented many decades ago, its commercialization was delayed by its fragility and high cost of manufacture, problems that have only recently been solved.
Aerogel is milky in colour, not fully transparent and has a visible transmittance that varies with its thickness. Aerogel glazing has a good light to solar gain ratio, making it an efficient source of diffuse, low contrast, natural daylight. Currently available aerogel products can achieve insulating values of R-8 oer inch (RSI-1.4 per 25 mm) more than twice that of glass fiber insulation.
Products
under development that rely on nanotechnology to improve thermal performance
are claimed to have insulating values as high as R-40 per inch (RSI-7 per 25
mm). This would appear to be the direction this technology is headed.
Aerogel is a synthetic porous ultralight material derived from a gel, in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. The result is a solid with extremely low density and thermal conductivity. It is nicknamed frozen smoke, solid smoke, solid air or blue smoke owing to its translucent nature and the way light scatters in the material; however, it feels like expanded polystyrene (styrofoam) to the touch.
Aerogel was first created by Samuel Stephens Kistler in 1931, as a result of a bet with Charles Learned over who could replace the liquid in "jellies" with gas without causing shrinkage.
Aerogels are produced by extracting the liquid component of a gel through supercritical drying. This allows the liquid to be slowly dryed off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse from capillary action, as would happen with conventional evaporation. The first aerogels were produced from silica gels. Kistler's later work involved aerogels based on alumina, chromia and tin dioxide. Carbon aerogels were first developed in the late 1980s.
Return from Aerogel Filled Glazing to Home Page
Return from Aerogel Filled Glazing to Origins of Glass
Hard copy and E book for sale. Introduction to Building Mechanical Systems. Click here.