A Window Into A Greener Future

Aerogels are a space-age, advanced material, that have been used for everything from high-energy physics experiments to micrometeorite capture in space to making a cold weather suit so insulating that the climber wearing it struggled with overheating on Everest. An aerogel starts out as a sol-gel, much like the jelly in your fridge, although made with chemicals that are not edible. At the microscopic level the aerogel has a sponge-like solid lattice with liquid-filled pores. Replacing this liquid with gas yields the incredible properties of aerogel, but this is easier said than done. Evaporating the liquid causes surface tension to collapse the delicate lattice, so more advanced and expensive methods are needed such as supercritical extraction. By bringing the solvent  to its supercritical phase and then cooling it down again, the solvent can become a gas without ever transitioning directly from liquid to gas, thus avoiding pore collapse. The resulting solid can range from 90% to 99% air, which is why it’s one of the lightest solids on earth and has been given the nickname “solid smoke”. Because the air, which is a very poor conductor of heat, is unable to convect heat due to the confinement of the pores, aerogel is an incredible insulator, which is its most useful and widely used property. At Union College our professors have patented a new rapid supercritical extraction process to make aerogels using a hot press and are researching how to use aerogels to insulate windows. Silica-based aerogels are translucent, and can be made transparent, which makes them suitable for usage in windows, although achieving full transparency is tough and is the subject of much of the ongoing research. Windows are one of the main places buildings lose heat, and thus better insulating them would save a great deal of the energy and fossil fuels used to heat our homes and offices. My research project is investigating the use of “green” methanol captured from flare gas as an environmentally friendly replacement for the lab-grade methanol we currently use to make aerogels. This would decrease our aerogel's carbon footprint. To this end, I have designed a mold that can make four samples at once, and am using it to make multiple batches of aerogels with a range of lab methanol  to flare gas methanol ratios. I will  use a spectrophotometer to compare the optical transmittance of these samples in order to determine if, or how much, the introduction of flare gas methanol impacts the transparency of aerogel. This poster will present my findings based on the results of my experiments and subsequent analysis.