A piece of ceramic aerogel "perched" on the stamen of a flower. Image source: Physicists Organization Network
According to the physicist organization network recently, an international scientific research team has developed an ultra-light and extremely durable ceramic aerogel. The new material can withstand extreme high temperatures and can withstand dramatic changes in temperature. It is expected to be used in spacecraft in the future. Thermal insulation protection.
Although more than 99% of its volume is air, the aerogel structure is strong. They can be made of many types of materials including ceramics, carbon or metal oxides. Compared with other insulators, ceramic aerogels have advantages in withstanding extremely high temperatures, and they have the characteristics of ultra-low density, fire resistance, and corrosion resistance. Therefore, they have been used in thermal insulation of industrial equipment since the 1990s , Also used in NASA's Mars probe. However, current ceramic aerogels are very fragile and can easily break after repeated exposure to extreme high temperatures and severe temperature fluctuations, which are common in space travel.
The newly developed ceramic aerogel is made of a thin layer of boron nitride and is a ceramic material in which atoms are connected in a hexagonal grid (similar to a wire mesh). Experimental tests show that this material loses less than 1% of its mechanical strength after being stored at 1400 ° C for one week. Moreover, when an engineer raises the temperature to 900 ° C and then drops to minus 198 ° C within a few seconds, it can withstand hundreds of times such severe temperature fluctuations.
In addition, the new material shrinks when heated, instead of expanding like other ceramics, so it is more flexible and more elastic than the current state-of-the-art ceramic aerogels: it can be compressed to 5% of its original volume and fully recovered; and Other existing aerogels can only be compressed to about 20% and then fully recovered.
The new materials were jointly developed by many institutions such as the University of California, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Harbin Institute of Technology, Lanzhou University, Southeast University, and King ’s University, and related papers have been published in the journal Science.
The research team leader and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA Duan Fengfeng said that the technology for developing this new aerogel can also be used to make other ultra-lightweight materials. "These materials can be used in spacecraft and automobiles. Or other special equipment insulation can also be used for thermal energy storage, catalysis or filtration. "(Reporter Liu Xia)
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