Aerogels Get Tougher to Meet Harsh Real World Challenges

Aspen Aerogel
Aerogel has proven to be a great insulator both on Earth, on Mars, under the oceans, and even in extreme expedition clothing, for use in both very cold and very hot environments.

Aerogels are finding wider use as insulators in the construction market, and have now reached the high end of home construction:

Over 70 years ago, scientists invented aerogel, the least dense solid known to man, and an insulator four times more efficient than fiberglass or foam. Famously, according to Dr. Peter Tsou of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house would become too hot."

Unfortunately, aerogels remained so expensive and unwieldy that only NASA used them with any regularity. However, thanks to recent production advances, aerogel insulation is now available and affordable for consumer purchase.

Even after the price drop, aerogels remain more expensive than common insulating materials. But since aerogels are more plastic than fiberglass or foam, permeable to water vapor, and flameproof, the extra cost may well be worth the investment when insulating masonry, shingles, or curved surfaces. Plus, since they're so light and efficient, aerogels reduce other building costs as well. _PopSci

Aerogel is even used by sculptors as a sculpture medium, but for it to be used to construct very large self-supporting 3D structures on its own, it needs to be toughened up somehow. Chinese and Japanese researchers have collaborated to create a hybrid aerogel using cellulose and silica, which is much tougher than regular aerogels.

The researchers at Wuhan University (China) and the University of Tokyo (Japan) have now developed a special composite aerogel from cellulose and silicon dioxide. They begin by producing a cellulose gel from an alkaline urea solution. This causes the cellulose to dissolve, and to regenerate to form a nanofibrillar gel. The cellulose gel then acts as a scaffold for the silica gel prepared by a standard sol–gel process, in which a dissolved organosilicate precursor is cross-linked, gelled, and deposited onto the cellulose nanofibers. The resulting liquid-containing composite gel is then dried with supercritical carbon dioxide to make an aerogel.

The novel composite aerogel demonstrates an interesting combination of advantageous properties: mechanical stability, flexibility, very low thermal conductivity, semitransparency, and biocompatibility _Nanowerk

A truly tough aerogel would be an amazing material for use in a wide variety of applications. Ultra lightweight, strong, flame-proof, conforming to a wide range of shapes, super-insulating, with fairly good sound insulating properties as well.

Ultralight multi-walled carbon nanotube aerogels:

This material is particularly interesting because it is composed of a dispersion of MWNTs which leave a honeycomb structure with controllable porosity. More-so, the aerogel has a large surface area and conducts electricity very well, but is a thermal insulator. This is an ideal characteristic for electronics.

Notably this is not the first aerogel made from carbon nanotubes (or CNTs for short if you’re hip to the materials crowd), nor is it the first CNT-based aerogel to exhibit amazing elastic properties. But it’s a new pathway to making CNT-based aerogels and the resulting materials are pretty cool. _aerogel.org

Wikipedia Aerogel

Aerogel Blog

Aspen Aerogel Products and Markets

What you see above is a rapidly developing material category which is likely to expand rapidly, once it has toughened up enough to "go the distance."

A monolithic dome insulated with aerogel walls and windows should easily keep a family warm even in polar environs, for very little cost of heating. Similarly, undersea habitats, high altitude lighter-than-air ships, and outer space habitats could be kept comfortable without adding significant weight.

Al Fin seastead engineers have even suggested using future, highly toughened aerogels as insulation for pykrete seasteads, to minimise cooling expenditures for the massive free-floating island habitats. The advanced aerogels would be used in conjunction with layers of supercooled liquid gels and integral perfusion channels for the "counter-current" flow of super-cooled fluids, within the pykrete and liqui-gel layers.

The ability to use inexpensive materials, such as pykrete, to build massive structures such as large seasteads, should make the idea practical much sooner.

Adapted from an earlier article on Al Fin the Next Level

Alien Spaceship? Or Antarctic Research Station?

Actually, it is a solar panel covered research station operated by tiny Belgium, of all countries.

Constructed on stilts on top of a ridge just north of the Soer Rondane Mountains, the base will focus on analyzing nearby deep ice shelves.


Teams of scientists, including glaciologists, are already at work there from Belgium, Japan, France, Britain and the United States.


Belgian Defense Minister Pieter De Crem and other government officials inaugurated the station on Sunday.


De Crem told VRT television from Antarctica: "It is really important that as a small country we can show our participation in large international efforts here in Antarctica."


"The base is in an isolated area where there has been little research done," said Maaike Van Cauwenbergh, from the Belgian Science Policy Office.


She said the steel-encased station is located in a vast 600-mile zone between the Russian and Japanese research stations.


The Princess Elisabeth uses microorganisms and decomposition that allows scientists to re-use shower and toilet water up to five times before discarding it down a crevasse.

Wind turbines on the Utsteinen mountain ridge provide the station with power, while solar panels on the bug-like, three-story building ensure the base has hot water. _RedOrbit

It is important that humans learn to live in polar conditions, given the inevitability of another global ice age in the coming future. It is also important to collect environmental and climate data from more points within the Antarctic continent, to avoid the type of pseudo-science recently perpetrated by Steig and Mann.

The problem of sustainable power supply in a polar winter has still not been solved. Solar panels are clearly worthless during the sunless and minimal sun months. Conventional wind turbines are unreliable, and easily overcome by severe winter conditions. In Antarctica, enhanced geothermal energy makes sense. Nuclear energy is, of course, the most sensible approach -- once reactors that allow many decades between refuelings are perfected.

For Pykrete structures floating on/in Arctic sea ice, a cold cycle form of OTEC has been proposed (as suggested in comments previously by a reader, and mentioned in Wikipedia).

Antarctic Colony Update: Colonize Antarctica

Antarctic Bases: Map Courtesy of 70South

The new blog, Colonize Antarctica, has some recent postings dealing with housing and building materials for the extreme frigid environment of Antarctica.

Building anything in Antarctica is difficult. The lack of conventional resources such as timber and the remoteness of the continent alone make traditional construction a challenge. This post aims to outline alternative methods of construction that may produce buildings suitable for an Antarctic colony.

Most of the structures built in Antarctica today are not well enough designed to serve a permanent colony. One fundamental flaw is they are built above ground and thus are subject to the forces of the wind and extreme cold. In addition to this most structures leak out heat through windows and doorways further increasing the energy required to heat them.

The easiest way to combat this would be to build structures underground. The permafrost in Antarctica would provide a temperature stable environment year round. I have been unable to locate reliable sub-surface temperate data for Antarctic permafrost at various depths. So, for the following example I will use estimates. If anyone has that temperature data please send it in or post it in the comments section here.___Colonize Antarctica

Using a custom designed mix of fibrous cement with a high insulation value may be a viable option for Antarctic construction. Some of the most well known mixes such as the ill fated Asbestos filled Fibro and the lesser known Papercrete likely wouldn't preform well in Antarctica. However, using a different fibrous material, such as hemp fibers combined with other insulating material may yield stronger and more well insulated structures. Standard rebar reinforced concrete could be used for load bearing walls and support columns.

Hemp fibers could be initially imported and later grown locally in large underground hydroponics bays. If a small cement factory could also be established, that would reduce the reliance on imports and make a partially self-sufficient Antarctic construction industry.

Fibrous cement is an amazingly versatile material and can be used for building everything from insulating shells for underground tunnels, interior walls, water pipes, to furniture and even novelty items. Certain mixes of fibrous cement can even be worked and sculpted like clay. Blocks or bricks can be poured in standardized sizes. Custom sized blocked can also be produced fairly easily. Entire walls can be poured into place if need be.
____Colonize Antarctica

There is more detail in the two articles linked above, on building methods and materials. Obviously, Antarctica is an unforgiving environment. Even with the best of planning, things can still go wrong--sometimes fatally wrong. There is little margin for error.
Other than undersea habitats, there is no other fixed habitat on Earth that offers the type of challenges that polar habitats offer. There is no better preparation for the type of vigilance required to survive in space, than living in an extreme Earth environment habitat or colony.

For humans to provide their own best chance of long-term survival, they must learn to live in extreme environments. It is a rite of passage--a necessary pathway to the future.

Greener Cars, Snow to Antarctica, a Coming Ice Age

This prototype electric car has some impressive stats: a battery range of over 150 km per charge, and speeds up to 120 km/hr.

Staff and students at the University of South Australia have designed and built a prototype of what they reckon might be the future commuter car for Australian cities. Trev sounds rather impressive. He goes from 0 to 100kph in 10 secs, has a top speed of 120 km/h, with a travel range of 150+km between charges of his 7kWh 44kg lithium ion polymer battery....When charged from mains power he costs you $1 AUD per 100km to run, using what is said to be 1/5th of the energy of conventional car. TH

Speaking of lithium ion batteries, a recent announcement of Li ion nanowire batteries claimed a 10 times greater capacity than conventional Li ion batteries. New Energy and Fuel has taken a look at those claims, and carefully explains why it will take some time just to achieve a 3X or 5 X increase in energy density from nanowires in Li ion. But in the long run--with radical improvements in cathode design, the silicon nanowire modification should work very well.

On a colder front, Russian Acadamician Khabibullo Abdusamatov updates his predictions for a coming (little) ice age.

"A year ago, many meteorologists predicted that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make the year 2007 the hottest in the last decade, but, fortunately, these predictions did not become reality," Abdusamatov said.

He also said that in 2008, global temperatures would drop slightly, rather than rise, due to unprecedentedly low solar radiation in the past 30 years, and would continue decreasing even if industrial emissions of carbon dioxide reach record levels.

By 2041, solar activity will reach its minimum according to a 200-year cycle, and a deep cooling period will hit the Earth approximately in 2055-2060. It will last for about 45-65 years, the scientist added. Source
via Tom Nelson

As for melting polar ice caps, think again. There has been a doubling of snow accumulation in parts of Antarctica, and prospects of rapid snowmelt in Greenland or Antarctica causing catastrophic sea level rise does not seem to be in the cards.

Personally, I like to think and act clean and green--within reason. Global warming catastrophism is not being green. It is being mindlessly faddish and fashionable. Being caught with your pants down when the next ice age hits could involve some painful frostbite.

If You Were to Colonise Antarctica, How Would You Do It?

Antarctica is as challenging an environment for a sustainable human colony as any land on Earth. The beautiful video above, revealing Antarctica in all four seasons, comes via Colonize Antarctica, a new website.

In yesterday's posting, Colonize Antarctica looked at energy supplies for the proposed colony. In my opinion, the list provided was much too short.

Geothermal and wind are certainly both good choices. Nuclear fission power--particularly newer, safer, cleaner modular designs would seem to be custom made for an Antarctic colony. Certainly if anything comes of Bussard's electrostatic confinement fusion project, such a device might very well serve as the nucleus of a well-rounded power system.

Remember, there is no sunlight for at least 4 months out of the year. It gets very cold in Antarctica--despite what Al Gore and James Hansen might have you believe. If you lose power in Antarctic winter, you are human popsicle. How would you start?
;-)

Exploring the Arctic In Style--ES Aurora Borealis

“Aurora Borealis is so important for research because, in contrast to previous research icebreakers, it will carry a new deep sea drilling system and will be able to work in the central Arctic Ocean throughout unfavourable seasons under the most extreme weather conditions” Source

This "European Ship" carries 55 megawatts of diesel-electric power, has a strong hull that crushes ice (instead of being crushed), and can stay on station for extended drilling in the middle of strong ice floes.

Aurora Borealis will be the first ever international ship, the brainchild of the European Science Federation, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Maritime Research in Germany and the Germany Federal Ministry of Research and Education....The ice over the polar seas masks millions of years of the planet’s history: drilling is difficult in freezing conditions. Aurora Borealis will be the world’s first icebreaker that is also a drilling ship. This sets unusual challenges for marine engineers: a vessel poised on top of 5000 metres of drilling rig cannot afford to move very much in any direction. But ice drifts, and currents and winds can alter in moments. So the ship will be designed not just to break the ice as it moves forward and astern, but also to port and starboard.

....Drill cores from the sea floor could answer questions about the geological history of the Arctic ocean, and other instruments will measure the transport of contaminants through the air, water and ice. The vessel could be home to 120 people, more than half of them scientists who need to go to sea to study the ice, the ocean beneath and the history of the deep sea floor.

It will be equipped with two “moon pools” in the bottom of the hull to give direct access to the open water beneath the ice, so that drillers can work in freezing conditions and biologists can launch underwater vehicles to study the mysterious processes that trigger an explosion of life in the polar seas every spring. The design and preparation of Aurora Borealis will continue until 2011. Builders could start assembling the hull in 2012, it could be cruising the oceans from 2014

ESF.org
It seems to me that if the ship's designers and owners had wanted a truly functional polar seas exploration vessel, they would have powered the ship with a nuclear reactor. Nuclear vessels not only have more available power, they have extended operating range and cruise times.

Given the likelihood of huge undiscovered oil and gas deposits beneath the Arctic Ocean ice, such icebreaking exploration drilling rig ships make perfect sense. Russia's insistence on being a part of the Aurora's mission may feel ominous to some who remember the USSR's proprietary attitude toward Europe, but no one has a monopoly on the design of such ships. There is nothing stopping the US, Canada, Norway, or any other interested Arctic community from building their own arctic exploration vessel. And they might do it right--with nuclear power.

ICE! God's Eye View of the Arctic Ice Cycle

The oscillation of the ice is like the heartbeat of a living animal. Awesome to watch. I suspect that sometime in the next few decades the ice will dip farther south--just like in the little ice age. When that happens, the earth will have much more difficulty trying to support all its billions. Newsweek was right back in the 70s. Global cooling is far more dangerous to humans than warming.

But for now, humans can relax and enjoy the modern cornucopia, and polar bears can relax and enjoy the seals (and any climate alarmists who wander out onto the ice!)
;-)

Hat tip Reference Frame

Dirty Snow Responsible for Over a Third of Arctic Warming

Soot from industry in China and other industrial northern nations, and soot from forest fires, is staining Arctic snow darker, helping to cause a substantial amount of arctic warming. Other causes of arctic warming include other atmospheric particles, clouds, land use, solar variability, and possibly greenhouse gases.

The public has a difficult time mentally distinguishing soot and other atmospheric particles from CO2 and other greenhouse gases. That is unfortunate, since the distinction is extremely important when considering the future of climate, and possible human interventions to mitigate possible warming.

Such a huge impact on arctic warming should have been discovered prior to this time, and would have been, if GCM climate models actually had any credibility. The stubborn tendency of climate modelers to refuse to look at other reasons for warming suggests that many other credible causes of warming may have been suppressed in the rush to blame CO2.

Global Warming Causing Extinction of Antarctic Polar Bears

You cannot help but wonder whether a President Gore might have acted soon enough to save the Antarctic Polar Bear. From the earliest days of human exploration in the Antarctic, Polar Bear sightings there have been extremely uncommon. With the arrival of global warming, antarctic polar bears are now almost completely extinct. The sad appearing antarctic polar bear pictured above may be the last of its breed. The albino bear (most antarctic polar bears have black fur) can be seen attempting to eat a downed weather balloon--certain proof that climate change has devastated the bear's normal food supply.

Soon we will be forced to add this tragic climate-caused extinction to that of the Arctic Emperor Penguin, extincted when its sole island breeding ground near the North Pole was submerged beneath the inexorable sea level rise caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

Yes, skeptics abound--the equivalent of holocaust deniers and evolution deniers! These scoundrels are in the pay of big oil and the Bush White House, but still we cannot stop everyone from taking them seriously.

I strongly recommend doing anything necessary to prevent ordinary people from visiting websites such as this or that. These people claim to be climate scientists, or math-savvy "auditors" of climate scientists, but we know they are in the pay of big oil and the Bush White House--Karl Rove and the neocons!

You must be as thoroughly chagrined as I am by the excessive caution of the most recent IPCC report. Like most environmentalists, I believe that as bad as global warming is--with these extinctions and all--we must exaggerate its effects to the public by at least a factor of one hundred. That is the only way to wake the idiots out of their oil-sotted slumber.

Global warming and peak oil may not seem to be able to coexist. They are said to be mutually exclusive, but as environmentalists we need to ignore such attempts to dampen our enthusiasm for control. As a matter of public stance, we should be saying that global warming is already past the point of no return, so that even after peak oil devastates the world economies, global warming will keep on flooding, extincting, hurricaning, and thermally exhausting the remaining humans on earth.

Pretty grim, eh? We need to make it sound as grim as necessary to bring about the changes we seek. Let's not allow the Antarctic Polar Bear to die in vain, shall we?

Fortunately, the arctic polar bear is in no danger of extinction--its numbers have increased by up to 25% over the past decade! If anything, the arctic polar bear is in danger of overpopulating its habitats due to overbreeding. Perhaps the arctic polar bear has an evolutionary adaptation that allows it to thrive in a climate of global warming?

In fact, that must be true, since in the medieval warm period--when temperatures were even higher than in modern times--the polar bear is said to have thrived.

In spite of that good news, we need to join Al Gore in projecting to the public the idea that all polar bears--not just the antarctic bear--are endangered by anthropogenic climate change. Mr. Gore's thriving carbon credit trading scheme depends on maintaining such public postures. Reality be damned, this is business!

New Discoveries in Climate Change

Clever new icebreaking techniques allowed scientists to drill over 400 meters of seafloor core, clarifying climate change over the past 56 million years. By using three icebreakers--one to maintain station over the drill site, and the other two to fend off ice flows--the scientists were able to remain on station at each of four drill sites for up to 9 days.

Results of the 2004 research expedition, led by scientists from the University of Rhode Island and Stockholm University, are reported in the June 1 issue of the journal Nature.

“Little direct evidence about the environmental history of the Arctic Ocean existed before our cruise, partly because of the enormous technological challenges of collecting the samples,” said Kate Moran, professor of oceanography and ocean engineering at URI and co-chief scientist on the expedition. “Our analysis of the core sample suggests that 55 million years ago the Arctic was much warmer than today. We anticipate that our data will be used by climate modelers to give us better information about how climate change occurs and where global climate might be heading.

....The sediment cores provide a surprising Cenozoic Era record of a climate transition from a warm “greenhouse” world in the late Palaeocene and early Eocene epochs to a colder “icehouse” world influenced by sea ice and icebergs from the middle Eocene to the present.

The researchers discovered that 55 million years ago, during a period called the Palaeocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, which was similar in climate to today, the surface temperature of the Arctic Ocean was much warmer than previously believed – perhaps as much as 20 degrees Celsius higher than today. The team was also surprised to find the remains of a large quantity of freshwater ferns, dated to 49.5 million years ago, which suggests that the ocean had considerably lower salinity levels and conditions amenable to the formation of sea ice.

Pebbles and sand in the sediment cores – debris that fell out of floating ice – is evidence of climate cooling 45 million years ago, about 35 million years earlier than previously believed. The revised timing of this Arctic cooling coincides with similar events in Antarctica, supporting the belief that global climate changed symmetrically at both poles.

....This Arctic Coring Expedition was undertaken by the National Science Foundation-sponsored Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international research effort that explores the history and structure of the Earth as recorded in seafloor sediments and rocks.....The drilling was done at four sites on the Lomonosov Ridge, approximately 1,000 meters under the sea-surface and 250 kilometers from the North Pole. Source.

The definition of an "ice age", is a time when the earth's poles are covered by ice. By that definition, the earth has been in an ice age for millions of years, with periodic periods of increased glaciation punctuated by much shorter inter-glacial periods. Climate change is merely part of the normal way of earth's climate.

Whether or not humans represent a serious destablising force in earth's climate or not is still a matter of serious debate among scientists. Certainly the sloppiness of many climate "scientists" lends a lot of ammunition to skeptics.

Regardless, it is nice to see real science being done, science that can shed real light on the topic. The earth has been through a lot over the past four billion years or so.