Global Info Reports Aerogels - The Strong but Lightweight Material | Page 4

Definition:
An aerogel is a mesoporous, open-celled, strong foam that is made out of a system of
nanostructures that are interconnected and that displays the property of porosity (volume
that is non- solid) of under 50 percent.
Substances for Making Aerogels
The term or the structure aerogel does not allude to a specific substance, yet rather to a
geometry that a substance that can take on the manufacturing of aerogel, in the similar way
a model can be made from papier-mâché, plastic, clay, and so on., aerogels may be
manufactured of a wide range of substances, including:
Silica
The wide range of the transition metal oxides (for instance, iron oxide)
The wide range of the actinide and lanthanide metal oxides (for instance, praseodymium
oxide)
Numbers of metal oxides from main group (for instance, tin oxide)
The organic polymers, (for example, phenol-formaldehyde, polyacrylates, resorcinol-
formaldehyde, polyurethanes, epoxies, and polystyrenes)
The biological polymers, (for example, pectin, agar, and gelatin)
Semiconductor nanostructures, (for example, quantum dots of cadmium selenide)
Carbon
Nanotubes of Carbon
Metals (for example, gold and copper)
4 | Page