Aerogel is one of those materials that sounds too bizarre to be real. Technically, it's 99.8% air, and 1,000 less dense than glass. It's also one of the best insulating materials known, working 39 times better than fibreglass. It was actually invented in 1939, but is best known as a tool used by NASA to capture space dust.
Soon, it may end up in your car.
GreenShift, an environmental sustainability-focused research and capital group, has just invested $500,000 in Aerogel Composite, in order to encourage their work on using aerogel to improve the efficiency of fuel cells. The use of aerogel both boosts the performance of energy transport and lowers the overall cost of production by reducing the need for platinum by 90%. Aerogel also has potential as an energy storage medium.
Sadly, it's still far too expensive to use for building insulation -- but since an inch of aerogel would insulate as well as a meter of fibreglass, you know somebody is thinking about it...
(Via Sustainability Zone)
