Aerogels, those space-age,
ultra-light materials, may hold a lot of promise as insulators. But they are
hardly the stuff of music.
Until now.
Meet Liz Lax '05, a member of this
summer's aerogel research team, who felt so moved by her research experience
that she is setting it to music.
The “Solgel Song” –
still a work in progress – captures the trials and tribulations of this
summer's Aerogel Research Team. (An aerogel is a type of solgel.)
An accomplished musician, Lax has
been playing guitar and singing for eight years. That's when she isn't studying
biochemistry, her major.
On a recent day, the sweet notes
of her guitar (“an old Fender that I drag around”) could be heard
wafting down the hall from a lab where Lax sat plucking out notes, one eye on a
computer program. “It's a great way to pass the time in the lab,” she
said. “When you're doing research, sometimes you have to wait around for
results.”
Some of the lyrics are:
“Here in the bat cave, we
play around with chemicals
Give me TMOS, methanol and ammonium hydroxide
Stir for ten minutes, don't forget the water
We're making sol-gels.”
Other members of this summer's
team were Shira Mandel '05, ME and chemistry; Yadira Briones '04, chemistry and
French; Bobby Dunton '05, ME and computer science; Jessica Grondin '05,
biochemistry; and Jan Konecny, an exchange student from Prague who is majoring
in mechanical engineering.
Project directors are Professors
Ann Anderson, mechanical engineering; and Mary Carroll, chemistry.
The project had its beginning
three 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.
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,
methanol, water and a catalyst. 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.”