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AEROGELS: 'SOLID SMOKE' MAY HAVE MANY USES
02 April 2004 - University of California, Davis
| It looks like glass and feels like solidified smoke, but the most interesting features of the new silica aerogels made by UC Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers are too small to see or feel. Lighter than styrofoam, this strange material is riddled with pores just nanometers in size, leaving it 98 percent empty. |
It looks like glass and feels like solidified smoke, but the most interesting features of the new silica aerogels made by UC Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers are too small to see or feel. Lighter than styrofoam, this strange material is riddled with pores just nanometers in size, leaving it 98 percent empty. Water can soak into the material, but in the confined space the water molecules arrange themselves in unusual ways, said Subhash Risbud, professor of chemical engineering and materials science at UC Davis. For example, a lipid membrane can spread across a wet aerogel just as it does around a living cell. Scientists studying such lipid membranes usually put them on a wafer of silicon or gold. Instead, the aerogel provides a wet cushion for the membrane, allowing it to have moisture on both sides and act more like a real cell in which membranes are studded with proteins. Researchers at Stanford University, led by engineering professor Curtis Frank and Risbud, recently patented the concept. The invention could be used for investigating diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and for biological testing devices. Aerogels are made by taking a wet gel - a meshwork of molecules in liquid, such as water - and removing the water to leave a spongy structure. The first aerogels were made in the 1930s by Samuel Kistler, and the technology was further developed by Lawrence Hrubesh and colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory over 40 years later. Silica aerogels also have many other applications in fiber optics, insulation against sound or heat, and miniature pumps for built-in refrigeration systems in packaging, Risbud said. The research project was part of the Center on Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies, a collaboration between Stanford, UC Davis, UC Berkeley and the IBM Almaden Research Center. Risbud also continues to collaborate with Joe Satcher and John Poco of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on silica aerogels. Subhash Risbud
Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
+1 530 752 0474
http://www.ucdavis.edu
About: University of California, Davis
Set between the Coast Range to the west and the towering Sierra Nevada to the east in the heart of the Central Valley, UC Davis is close to California’s thriving state capital and the San Francisco Bay Area UC Davis is one of 10 campuses of the University of California, which was chartered as a land grant college in 1868 and now constitutes the pre-eminent system of public higher education in the country. Together, the 10 campuses have an enrollment of some 173,000 students, 90 percent of them California residents. Some 150 laboratories, extension centers, research and field stations strengthen teaching and research while providing public service to California and the nation. The collections of the more than 100 UC campus libraries are surpassed in size in the United States only by that of the Library of Congress. The Davis campus has undergraduate colleges of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science. Located off-campus are numerous laboratories, extension centers and facilities, including the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, the Lake Tahoe Center for Environmental Research, the Veterinary Medicine Teaching and Research Center in Tulare, Bodega Marine Laboratory at Bodega Bay, the College of Engineering’s applied science department at Livermore and the UC Davis Washington Center in Washington, DC. UC Davis faculty ranks 16th in quality among comprehensive public universities nationwide, according to a multi-year study of US doctoral programs reported in 1995 by the National Research Council. Creative teaching and academic innovation are encouraged by several programs, including the $30,000 Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement, believed to be the largest award of its kind in the US. |
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