"Can we get them up to 1.21 Gigawatts?"
Posted on 08/20/2007 6:19:10 AM PDT by Gamecock
Yes. It was used in a space probe to collect comet dust.
Use tomato juice for removing skunk smell. Works great.
There is a LOT of material on silica aerogels. Just google and you’ll probably get more than you ever wanted. But I haven’t seen anything recently to say that they’re substantively different than they were a couple of years ago. They were invented in the 1930s on a bet where some egg head bet another one that he couldn’t remove the water without destroying the gel. I think that supercritical ethanol was used, but I’m not sure about this. A friend of my roommate in grad school in the material science department was screwing around with them and would never let anyone touch his gels becuse he said they were way too easy to break. First you’d give it a little pinch, and then squeeze it a bit harder and then when nothing happened you’d squeeze it harder still and, pop, it was dust in the carpet.
This is the coolest thing since flubber. :)
well. Whether it’s there PR group or whether something has changed they are all of the sudden all over the news in the last few day.
Well - it many ways it is. I just read about a completely different application of this stuff to build what are called “Ultra Capacitors” These are storage devices that can hold huge amounts of electricity - and they have the advantage over batteries of having 1/10-1/100 the recharge time and 300,000-400,000 recharge cycle life times.
The problem is they still only have about 1/10 the capacity of batteries. If they can move into the same arena as Lead-acid - then electric cars become practical.
You can literally think of driving up to a recharge station and take 10 minutes to recharge your car instead of 4-8 hours.
"Can we get them up to 1.21 Gigawatts?"
Well, if that's the case, I'd better jump on my Segway and go get me some.
Lots of articles on this today, including drudge and one from newsweek last week.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2284349.ece
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20123389/site/newsweek/
Interesting stuff.
B4L8r. This stuff has been around for a long time now, it should be hitting the markets soon.
news flash...electric cars are already very practicle thanks to teslamotors.com. They are using lithium ion batteries for a 200-250 mile range and a 4.5 hour recharge. They can recharge in about 10 minutes but there is some infastructure that needs to be built for that. Their first production roadster is not cheap, $100,000 but they intentionaly did that to get more capitol and come out with a lower cost sedan and then with an even lower cost car affordable to most. This is real and finally about to take off. Their roadsters are sold out, I believe for this year and will be on the road shortly.
Terrorists/suicide bombers die so as to go to a heaven with fountains of WATER. If aerogels can be a key component in recycling dirty water, perhaps even in removing NaCl from seawater, then it becomes a key weapon in the WOT. Give those DRY areas of the ME all the fresh WATER they could ever want and the crazies go away...
Bomb blasts, fly to Mars, oil spills. The answer to every homeowner’s prayers. Now, if they’d only throw in a free Veg-o-Matic...
I hear it’s lighter than fly poop!
I respect your ‘fruit cake barrier’ but the raw material is such a rarity on Earth. Even rarer, you have found one that is not impervious to cold steel or lasers.
Didn’t you know there are only 27 fruitcakes in those tin containers in existence in all the world. They keep circling the Earth, from family to family, as each one passes it on to another ‘friend’ or distant relation as a Christmas gift (cheap)
Shhhhhh...
I saw this stuff a few months ago on the Science Channel...
The filter industry is about to go ape doo doo over this stuff...When they figure out its semi-permiable capabilities, this stuff is going to revolutionize several different engineering issues...
Its almost going to be like what velcro, duct tape and Tang did in our lives...
A lot of people I’ve heard are looking to dump a lot of investment capital into whomever can commercialize it...
But I’ve only heard of that...
Now we put lithium ion, aerogel , nanofibers, carbon-fiber, and other technologies together and we got
electric flying vehicles
Lightweight, high-range, high-speed electric cars.
Any heat from the engine can be used to run stirling engines with generators on them, and be possible to drive and park the vehicle with minimal battery consumption.
The MythBusters guys determined that baking soda and hydrogen peroxide solution worked the best, IIRC.
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