Ultra-light ceramic aerogel can withstand extreme temperatures

According to physicist organizational networks recently reported, an international research team developed a severe variation of one ultra-light and extremely durable ceramic airgel, new materials can withstand high temperatures and can withstand extreme temperatures, the future is expected for spacecraft Thermal insulation and so on.

Although more than 99% of its volume is air, the aerogel structure is strong. They can be made from many types of materials including ceramics, carbon or metal oxides. Compared with other insulators, ceramic aerogels have advantages in extreme high temperature tolerance, and they have ultra-low density, fire resistance and corrosion resistance. Therefore, they have been used in industrial equipment insulation since the 1990s. It is also used in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Mars probe. However, current ceramic aerogels are very fragile and are highly susceptible to cracking after repeated exposure to extreme heat and severe temperature fluctuations, which are common in space travel.

The newly developed ceramic aerogel is made of a thin layer of boron nitride and is a ceramic material in which atoms are connected in a hexagonal grid (like a wire mesh). Experimental tests have shown that this material loses less than 1% of mechanical strength after storage for one week at 1400 °C. Moreover, when an engineer raises the temperature to 900 ° C in a few seconds and then drops to minus 198 ° C, it can withstand hundreds of such temperature fluctuations.

In addition, the new material shrinks when heated, rather than expanding like other ceramics, and is more flexible and flexible than the most advanced ceramic aerogels available today: it can be compressed to 5% of the original volume and fully recovered; Other existing aerogels can only be compressed to about 20% and then fully recovered.

The new materials were jointly developed by the University of California, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Harbin Institute of Technology, Lanzhou University, Southeast University, and King's University of Saudi Arabia. The related papers have been published in the journal Science.

Duan Chengfeng, a research team leader and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that the new aerogel technology could also be used to make other ultra-light materials. "These materials can be used in spacecraft and automobiles." Insulation of other special equipment or heat storage, catalysis or filtration."