Posted on 08/19/2007 11:59:34 AM PDT by marvlus
Gadzooks, great minds do run alike!
And, yes... I am older than dirt!
It holds its shape, and doesn't wobble -- more like ultra-light styrofoam than jell-o. When you hold it in your hand, you have to keep your eye on it, because it doesn't weigh enough that you even feel it on your fingertips. It's the least dense solid yet discovered.
I don't know how much pressure it would take to mash it between your fingers -- the sample I got to hold didn't belong to me, so I couldn't try that. I believe that for insulation, you'd need to put it between two sheets of something rigid. Ditto to make it part of an armor system -- if you just painted it on vehicles in Iraq, I think it'd be sandblasted off in no time.
As another poster mentioned, NASA's stardust probe used blocks of aerogel to trap dust samples. It was the perfect medium to capture the particles without deforming them, and the trails they leave behind can be used to calculate their speed and direction when they hit.
I want to pump this stuff into my walls. :)
Oh, me too. Thing is, aerogels are not classified, and I the substance itself can't be patented, though manufacturing methods can. A search for {aerogel recipe} in Google yields plenty of hits -- but you can't just whip up a batch in your kitchen unless you have appliances that can crank out pretty extreme temperatures and, especially, pressures.
I wonder if he has investments in this?
I suppose you’re now going to tell me that getting a fifty degree house up to sixty won’t take less time if I put the stat to ninety. Hah! ;)
I comfort myself reading all the comments on the original article page. As many agree with me as don’t.
thinking of 3-d displays at the moment...
Most likely.
Depends on where and how accurate the sensors are. If a thermostat works ideally the way it's supposed to -- set a temperature, and the entire house is heated or cooled to that temperature -- then you're right.
My thermostat is in the hallway, near the center of the house -- as far as it can get from windows and exterior walls. In the rooms with windows and exterior walls, it's going to be cooler than in the hall. Improve the insulation on the exterior, and those rooms wil be closer to the temperature at the thermostat, and you can likely turn the heat down.
I read about this stuff back in the 80’s.
This stuff has been around for over a decade. If it hasn’t changed the world by now, it’s not going to.
Super-light styrofoam, basically. I handled it gingerly, and didn't poke or prod it, because I didn't want to risk damaging it -- it was a gift to a friend of mine from a friend at NASA. But I couldn't feel its weight in my hand. I had to keep an eye on it to make sure it was there.
You are a comic genius. I bow to your superior talent.
One of the amazing things about the gaggle of people who inhabit JimRob's house occurred to me when I discovered that often, when a completely off-the-wall comment springs to mind upon reading a story, I'll read further down and see that someone else already said it, and better, in the first handful of comments...it's nice to know there are so many twisted people here! :-)
they should include a piece in every box of raisin bran!
ReignOfError has right. The differential between your room temperature and your thermostat reading depends on how far apart they are located. Ideally, the stat temp reads what the room does and insulation changes will be reflected in how often the AC or heater cycles. Changing the stat changes the room temp.
The differential comes in with open doors and windows, obviously. If the change in insulation were THAT significant, yeah, it would matter. Real world, I don’t see the differential being significant based on type of insulation.
A well insulated house has fewer drafts. A drafty house feels colder than one without drafts — therefore, you tend to turn the thermostat up.
Yup. What I didn't know until i did a little reading just now is that there are a lot of flavors of aerogels -- silicon-based ones are the most common, but carbon-based and some metals-based.
Basically, an aerogel is a gel that has all the liquid removed, forming a substance that's 99% empty space with a strong, rigid crystalline structure. One company claims to have a new form of aerogel, which it has not yet published,that can support 10,000 times its own weight.
My own house has an issue where the heat pump thermostat responds much more to the wall temperature than the air temperature; whereas humans generally are more cognizant of the air temp, although wall temps affect radiational cooling from your body.
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