September 18, 2003: Volume 59, Number 2

At last, a song about aerogels

Aerogels, those space-age, ultra-light materials, may hold a lot of promise as insulators. But they are hardly the stuff of music.

Until now.

Meet Liz Lax '05, a member of this summer's aerogel research team, who felt so moved by her research experience that she is setting it to music.

The "Solgel Song" – still a work in progress – captures the trials and tribulations of this summer's Aerogel Research Team. (An aerogel is a type of solgel.)

An accomplished musician, Lax has been playing guitar and singing for eight years. That's when she isn't studying biochemistry, her major.

On a recent day, the sweet notes of her guitar ("an old Fender that I drag around") could be heard wafting down the hall from a lab where Lax sat plucking out notes, one eye on a computer program. "It's a great way to pass the time in the lab," she said. "When you're doing research, sometimes you have to wait around for results."

Some of the lyrics are:

"Here in the bat cave, we play around with chemicals
Give me TMOS, methanol and ammonium hydroxide
Stir for ten minutes, don't forget the water
We're making sol-gels."

 

Other members of this summer's team were Shira Mandel '05, ME and chemistry; Yadira Briones '04, chemistry and French; Bobby Dunton '05, ME and computer science; Jessica Grondin '05, biochemistry; and Jan Konecny, an exchange student from Prague who is majoring in mechanical engineering.

Project directors are Professors Ann Anderson, mechanical engineering; and Mary Carroll, chemistry.

The project had its beginning three years ago when Anderson and a former student, Ben Gauthier '02 (now at Stanford), began experimenting with the process. Before long, they were consulting with faculty in chemistry for help in understanding the chemical processes involved.

Launched with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the project moved into a new lab in Science and Engineering this year.

Aerogels are ultra-light matrix materials that are excellent insulators. The challenge for the researchers is to devise a manufacturing method that will make production of the material more cost effective. Current applications are limited mostly to the space program, where aerogels have been used as an insulator on the Mars rover and to collect comet dust.

The team is producing aerogels in a hydraulic, heated press where they combine a mixture of tetramethylorthosilicate, methanol, water and a catalyst. The mixture gels and the "wet" gel is then brought to a "supercritical" phase in which there is no surface tension between the liquids and solids. At that point, the wet gel can be dried without degrading the solid matrix inherent in that form of aerogel.

The team is focusing on finding improvements in the manufacturing process and on characterizing the properties of the aerogels produced. They have applied for a patent on a process they call a "Fast Supercritical Extraction Technique for Simplified Aerogel Fabrication."

 

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