The best part of the aerogel
research project is the weekly meetings between the chemistry and mechanical engineering
students and faculty, according to Ann Anderson, associate professor of
mechanical engineering.
“I haven't had that experience since graduate
school,” she says. “The mechanical engineers offer solutions to the problems of
the chemists, and the chemists offer solutions to the problems of the
mechanical engineers.”
Anderson
will be talking about some of those problems and solutions in a faculty
colloquium – “From Computers to Moss to Aerogels: The Art and Science of
Thermal Fluid Engineering” – on Tuesday, May 13, at 11:30 a.m. in the F.W.
Olin Center
Auditorium.
The collaboration of faculty and
students is essential to the work of the aerogel lab since there is so much
overlap in the field, Anderson says.
The project had its beginning two years ago when Anderson and a former
student, Ben Gauthier '02 (now at Stanford), began experimenting with the
process. Before long, they were consulting with faculty in chemistry for help in
understanding the chemical processes involved. Mary Carroll, associate
professor of chemistry, is co-director of the project.
Launched
with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the project moved into a new
lab in Science and Engineering this year.
Aerogels
are ultra-light matrix materials that are excellent insulators. The challenge
for the researchers is to devise a manufacturing method that will make
production of the material more cost effective. Current applications are
limited mostly to the space program, where aerogels have been used as an
insulator on the Mars rover and to collect comet dust.
The team
is producing aerogels in a hydraulic, heated press where they combine a mixture of tetramethylorthosilicate (a catalyst), methanol and water. The mixture gels and
the “wet” gel is then brought to a “supercritical” phase in which there is no
surface tension between the liquids and solids. At that point, the wet gel can be
dried without degrading the solid matrix inherent in that form of aerogel.
The team
is focusing on finding improvements in the manufacturing process and on characterizing
the properties of the aerogels produced. They have applied for a patent on a
process they call a “Fast Supercritical Extraction Technique for Simplified
Aerogel Fabrication.”
Anderson, who specializes in the
field of convective heat transfer, discovered early in her time at Union
the value of collaborating with faculty outside her department. For example,
she discovered through Steve Rice, assistant
professor of biology that the
way in which water is transferred from moss canopies to the environment is very
similar to the way in which heat is transferred from a computer chip. She
and Rice did research on the mosses, putting them in a wind tunnel to
investigate their evaporation properties.
“That's the nice thing about Union's
[small] size,” she says. “It encourages faculty and students to seek collaboration
with people in other disciplines.”
Anderson, who is chair of the
department, holds the Thomas J. Watson Sr. and Emma Watson Day Professorship.
She earned her bachelor's degree from Tufts
University and her master's and
Ph.D. from Stanford. She joined Union in 1992.