![]() ![]() First, the silica had a tendency to flake out of the fiber blanket with movement, a problem for a jacket intended for athletes. “When we made the original jacket with these aerogel blankets, we learned that they were amazing insulators, and they were good for apparel-but not great,” Markesbery recalled. ![]() Oros, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, boasted customers could wear a Lukla jacket “with no layers and be perfectly warm in even the MOST EXTREME temperatures,” thanks to its NASA-tested and approved aerogel insulation.īut the young company wasn’t ready to rest on its laurels. They quickly raised more than $300,000 and sold more than 1,100 jackets, all featuring the aerogel blankets developed with NASA funding. They ultimately came across Aspen Aerogels, launched a Kickstarter campaign (featuring a video of Gibson), and started selling the brand-new company’s first product: the Lukla jacket, insulated with Aspen’s aerogel blankets. Confident they had a good idea for a product, “we took the $10,000 from the scholarship and our own money, and dumped it into working with different aerogel manufacturers,” he says. The astronaut scholarship also came with another perk that helped Markesbery and his collaborators: $10,000. “I started getting intrigued,” he says, remembering his problem with bulky layers and wondering if this could help him make something better. NASA used the material for its cryogenic fuel tanks and pipelines, and elsewhere in other formulations, but the material has also found ain many applications outside the space industry, including building and construction, appliances and refrigeration equipment, and more.Īll of this development happened well before Markesbery summited in Switzerland, but he didn’t find out about aerogel until several years later, when he won a scholarship from the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation for his undergraduate research.Īs part of the award, Markesbery got to meet NASA personnel, including astronaut Robert Gibson, from whom he finally learned about the material. to sell its flexible aerogel commercially. Further SBIR contracts and partnerships helped prove the excellent insulating characteristics of the new composite material and improve manufacturing practices to make it cheaper and faster to produce.Īspen saw that it had a marketable product and spun off a division called Aspen Aerogels Inc. The company soon developed aerogel composite blankets that fill the spaces of a fiber web with silica aerogel. to work on creating that flexible, durable, easy-to-use form of aerogel. The following year, Kennedy awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract to Aspen Systems Inc. He wanted to use it to insulate the equipment that stored and transferred liquid fuel for the Space Shuttle, which needed to be kept at temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero. In 1992, Kennedy Space Center’s James Fesmire, the mechanical engineer responsible for managing cryogenic propellant systems design at the launch pads, had an idea for a flexible aerogel insulator-a composite with the same ability to stop heat as traditional silica aerogel but one which would solve the brittleness problem. So for decades, silica aerogel was hardly ever used. ![]() Silica, one of the key ingredients in glass, is brittle: as an aerogel, it would crack under the slightest pressure. The possible applications for the material were obvious, but pure silica aerogel had a pretty major downside. ![]() That nanoporous structure gives silica aerogel the lowest thermal conductivity of any known solid, which means it’s an incredibly good insulator, and because the structure is 95 percent air, it is also extremely lightweight. When made out of silica, or fused quartz, the resulting material has pores less than one-ten thousandth the diameter of a human hair, or just a few nanometers. Aerogels are a class of materials that are made by creating a kind of gel and then removing all the liquid through a process known as supercritical drying, leaving a porous solid filled with air. The material, silica aerogel, was first invented nearly 100 years ago, before the Space Agency was founded. Actually, he didn’t know it, but something already existed that could make incredibly warm outerwear with far less bulk, and it owes much of its development to NASA. “I remember thinking, it’s the 21st century, but I still have to wear all this bulk and layers to stay warm?” recalls Markesbery. When Michael Markesbery, future cofounder of Oros, climbed the tallest mountain in the Swiss Alps with friends, he was bundled up with so many bulky layers he could barely move his arms. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |