I Waterproofed Myself With Aerogel!
I feel confident You’re self-confident that Iam NOT gonna be damaged? not permanently okay let me back up for a few moments. I wantto talk about the dimensions of aerogel the world’s lightest solid. What I’mgonna do is I’m gonna lean in so it’s coming in through this mic and then canyou do that again yeah this is what it sounds like that is weird it has a metallic doughnut first recognized by aerogel’s inventor Samuel Kistler allthe direction back in 1931. now aerogel is an excellent thermal insulator but it’s notthe easiest material working in collaboration with can I try it sure oh I didn’t I don’t quitehave the touch oh I can’t I make it reverberating oh no regard it didn’t take a whole lot tobreak it right it divulges pretty easily so is there a practice to take theextraordinary thermal isolation of aerogel but make it more usable what Iput together here is just a combination of aerogel particles silica aerogelparticles and a non-flammable binder and you should be able to gave it on youryour skin and hit yourself with the flashlight should right I’ll give it a shotokay so you just take a little bit and constrict it around your digit justaround yeah exactly pinch it around here one digit a two thumbs you require matterhow’s that am I am i doing it oh yeah that’s that’s yeah I’ll be good justwanna make sure the fervor where reference is get around your thumb doesn’t reached theBearskin seems like it’s pretty thin around this finger tip-off here like howthick should it be you’re making me nervousholding a blowtorch can I do the blowtorching or you can do theblowtorching perfectly because I mean if this is if this goes wrong so how hotis a blowtorch kindle well it’s really hard to tell but from our experienceit’s usually you know at least 1500 severities C and can get as hot as 2000 so yeah this is very hot all right let’s try it this is so wrong that littlejittery pan there I you know it looks like I’m toasting a marshmallowwhoa why is it flaring like that and what is burning binder right now correctshould people simply regard the rate on there it doesn’t feel red-hot at all myfinger does not feel hot at all that is insane right therepropriety I cannot speculate how a little warmth I feel passing through that theFLIR 10 2013 10 per ature compass and now the aerogel is clearly hotter thanthe 160 grades Celsius upper limit I imply it’s gleam orange hot so it’sclearly unbelievably red-hot I entail if “youre seeing” the blackbody radiationyou know that it’s very hot so we went to the highest temperature range so thisgoes up to 2,000 Celsius 881 907 907 907 stages Celsius that is absurd prettygood title in front of my digit what so this was was about almost athousand Celsius but behind this thin mantle of aerogel my digits are justjust warm Wow I imply it is clear this stuff insulates this video is abouttaking air gelatins fantastic qualities and improving on them for example I’mabout to step into this pool without going sodden there’s a mantle of breath thereright next to my skin that thin layer of breath is what attains my bark watches silverylight from specific tilts manifests off the irrigate breath interface in what’s calledtotal internal reflection that is very strange this is a really cool effect Imean just besides the fact that I’m basically waterproof I feel like thisextra air on me is compiling me more buoyant than usuallet me try coming out by the water and see if I’m still dry that is true I don’t I don’t really feelwet at all that was weird really weird so how did Imake myself waterproof I did it with aerogel corpuscles by taking a bucket ofthem and coating myself with the tiny best but this is a kind of strange wayto become raincoat because ordinary silica aerogel is hydrophilic there wego now this is a hydrophilic aerogel so all those OAH groups inside the aerogelare absorbing the liquid and beginning the aerogel formation to crumble aerogel isreally good at absorbing water for two reasons first it contains a lot ofsurface area due to its nano magnitudes sponge-like structure an ice cube sizedpiece of aerogel contains half a football field of surface area thatmakes it good at assimilating lots of molecules something scientists havesought to exploit my favorite work which I still think today isa good theme is what’s the idea is a a physical insecticide so mostinsecticides direct by being neurotoxins they’re announced cholinesterase inhibitorsit’s the same mechanism as nerve gas and we spray this on harvests and things but aphysical insecticide directs by mostly get poke to the outer skin of theinsect and and basically sucking all the moisture the or the petroleums out of them tothe stage where they just sort of dry out to death it’s kind of like puttingsalt on a Sluggers yeah that’s a very good analogy precisely the other reasonit’s good at absorbing irrigate specific is because it’s structureis covered with OAH radicals which attract water molecules and that makes it idealfor be utilized in museums in the past I’ve been working with a company in Italy calledopium which starts Museum events I means they obliged the instance for Mona Lisa theyare interested in putting aerogels in the instances because it’s a passivemoisture a regulator virtually once you have it inside if the moistureincreases the original a lot of it if it decreases it releasessome of it air gelatins ability to absorb is even being used right now to help detectMars quakes these were the ones that were started for the NASA insight missionthis aerogel looks like chalk because so-called zeolite particles aredispersed throughout it they can absorb moisture even at very low pressuresthere’s a seismometer that contains three small-scale seismometers and requiressince they’re so small they require exceptional vacuum-clean inside otherwise themotion get stomped so that’s what we developed this for the zoo light-footeds werehelping assimilate the humidity mainly that was coming off of thehypotheses and gave me some gassing different things so that is it’s sort ofmaintaining the vacuum by sustain – pulling things it’s actually a vacuumball if you think of it that way and what’s interesting about it is it doesnot require any power any intakes very light so essentially this is whatenabled the inside mission to work aerogel can assimilate up to 25 terms itsweight in liquid but for some employments this is less than ideal soonce we’ve done this is that article of aerogel spoilt now pretty much yeahthat’s that’s entropy irreversible shattering there to counteract this issue wetake a hydrophobe it’s a reactive substance that when it strokes a no Hgroup spontaneously rearranges with that o age group and creates this bignon-polar group and that repulses ocean so by replacing only 30% of the Oh H groupsthat course the inside of the aerogel with these hydrophobic radicals you can make anaerogel that perfectly fights irrigate so here water ejects off it’s totallyimpervious it does not penetrate in and it can sit on water for months and itwill be really the same as if it was never dried at all “youre ready” I guesslet’s go shot there it vanishes it feels funny cuz it like it hardlyfeels like the water is touching me because in a way the irrigate isn’ttouching it’s not touching you that’s what’s amazing at the molecularlevel it is being rebuffed examination how crazy that it’s like a funny laminarflow this is so trippy so aerogel can be made impervious towater or more adsorbent it is naturally brittle but it can be drove into asticky glue and so far I’ve really merely focused on silica aerogel but breeze gelscan be made out of all sorts of different materials so all of thesematerials are nano structured that’s right and they have nano sized poresaround 20 nanometers in immensity that’s right and they are over 50% deviate correctwhich is why they’re also light-footed lightweight yeah some of them are madeof polymers and there is a trade-off between thermal and mechanicalproperties a traditional silica aerogel is frequently around 15 milliwatts permeter Kelvin thermal conductivity so that implies about 3 times 2 to 3 timesbetter segregating than styrofoam these materials would be between one and ahalf to two times more insulating than styrofoam somewhere around 20 to 26 milliwatts per meter Kelvin this is a poly a madero gelatin this chemistry camefrom NASA so it’s a great insulating material but it’s not flammable knock onit it feels like wood internally we call it Martian tape another way to makeaerogel more workable is to incorporate it into composite textiles likeblankets something that’s in between silicon and silica that feels nice itfeels very nice doesn’t this feels like almost like a stuffed animal yeahexactly so this is a new type of aerogel blanketthat in the future we may find in something like an astronaut dres ormaybe even clothe what this material is actually it’s fiberglass it does feellike it’s a fiberglass that’s been infused with aerogeland so that fiberglass aerogel composite so because aerogels are traditionallyvery fragile bike um positing it with the fiberglass allowsyou to establish something that are able flexed and cut and hem and wrap it’s notthe most cuddly it it removes dust when you sounds on it but go ahead and dust isthat that’s silica aerogel to morphus silica and it’s it’s very safe it’s notfor example like quartz fiber or asbestos which are you know longaspect-ratio fibers that the body has no substance represents or physical means ofbreaking down this substance is readily captured and and expelled by the bodyand it’s it’s not dangerous and this is what they use to insulate subsea oilpipelines and refineries and all sorts of lotions so only that thicknesswill isolate a pipeline yeah so that thickness that that one this is onecentimeter thick in one centimeter you get the same effective insulation valueas three centimeters over an inch of mineral coat or fiberglass by itself soit’s a tremendously better insulator this blanket is actually what I’m gonnaput to the test in the final episode of the aerogel trilogy so subscribe if youdon’t want to miss it
