Looks like a great material to isolate a house and save heating money. Also great for saving air conditioning bills in desertic areas. If is just silica, why is not being sold yet? NASA could have stored some slighly defective or second grade quality blocks, unfit for space shuttle but waiting for a second life.
Producing aerogel is not easy. It's "just silica" in the same way that a diamond is "just carbon".
The regular house insulation already works pretty well, and heating is not incredibly expensive. Aerogel would have to come way down in price for it to make economic sense.
I'm still trying to figure out how to manufacture enormous quantities of lighter-than-air SEAgel in different flavors and colors, to solve the world's hunger and food delivery problems in one swoop. Edible SEAgel blimp drones!
>SEAgel (Safe Emulsion Agar gel) is one of a class of high-tech foam materials known as aerogels. It is an excellent thermal insulator and among the least dense solids known. SEAgel was invented by Robert Morrison at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1992. SEAgel is made of agar, a carbohydrate material that comes from kelp and red algae, and has a density of 200 mg/cm3. SEAgel can be made lighter than air using hydrogen, causing it to float or hang in the air. It insulates against temperature, noise, and electric current. SEAgel is also completely biodegradable, as it is made entirely of biological material and can even be eaten.
Neat. I've played around a bit with a kit of different densities of aerogel made by Philips, crazy material properties, especially on the less dense end of the spectrum. The lightest was something like 3% glass by volume, eerie stuff.
>Aeroeggs from Aerogelex are unique aerogels made from hard-boiled eggs. While many people think of space-age blue holographic solids made of silica when they hear the word aerogel, aerogels can actually be made from a wide variety of substances including biopolymers such as those found in eggs. Aeroeggs are made through supercritical drying, the same process used to make other aerogels, just using boiled eggs instead of silica or polymer gel precursors. Boiling an egg causes the proteins in the egg to denature and link together to form a gel matrix that contains water in its pores. Once the inside of the egg has congealed, the shell is removed and the boiled egg inside is soaked in ethanol to replace the water in its pores with a non-polar solvent that is compatible with supercritical drying. After soaking the egg is put in a high-pressure vessel and the ethanol in its pores is extracted with supercritical carbon dioxide to make an egg aerogel.
>Aeroeggs are made from ordinary chicken eggs but are about half the size of a typical hard boiled egg due to contraction of the egg protein network when the water in the egg is replaced with ethanol and carbon dioxide. Density is approximately 0.6 g/cc making Aeroeggs approximately 50% air by volume. Aeroeggs absorb 3x their weight in water to irreversibly rehydrate back into regular hard boiled eggs.
While the tiles do have in common with aerogel that both are comprised of amorphous silica and air, they are different in many other significant ways. LI-900 is 6% silica by volume, the rest being air; silica aerogel is typically 0.2%–0.5% silica, but has been made with densities as low as 0.1%. LI-900 is opaque; aerogel is transparent. LI-900 can be "plunged into water without damage", even when hot; some silica aerogels will simply collapse if exposed to water, while others have been treated to make them hydrophobic and will probably just break into pieces. Aerogels are usually fairly isotropic, while LI-900 is anisotropic, like felt. Aerogel is made from hydrogel by supercritical boiling — at the time of the STS design, supercritical boiling of ethanol, a process that had resulted in a number of serious industrial accidents, but nowadays of CO₂, while LI-900 is made by dispersing spun glass in water, pressing it into blocks, and sintering.
So it's not the same thing at all, even though it's made from the same raw material.
