They may have a space-age feel to them, but aerogels got their start almost three-quarters of a century ago.

In 1931, Steven Kistler of the College of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., took the first steps to prove that a theoretical “dry” gel contained a continuous solid network of the same size and shape as its familiar “wet” counterpart.

Kistler first achieved success using a silica gel (aqueous sodium silicate) by washing it with water, then exchanging the water for alcohol. By converting the alcohol to a supercritical fluid and allowing it to escape, he formed the first aerogel.

There was a big buzz in the materials science community about Kistler’s discovery and he left his academic post to manufacture aerogels for Monsanto. However, by the 1960s, new innovations led to a less expensive and less costly alternative to the primitive aerogels; they were old news.

By the early ‘80s, advancements in the production process and materials put aerogels back on the radar screen. They could now be engineered and designed with numerous applications—more than their past duties as thickening/anti-caking agents in makeup and toothpaste.

Now BASF, Hoechst Corp and agencies like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and NASA are looking into aerogels’ potentialities. Silica aerogels, developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, have flown on Space Shuttle missions to capture high-velocity cosmic dust particles.

Back To The Future

This new generation of aerogels holds great promise for a broad array of industrial and scientific uses.

Since the material is fundamentally like solid smoke, it’s incredibly light (about 95 percent air) yet stable and strong, with an impressive resistance to heat transfer.

Think lighter armored vests; stronger bumpers for motor vehicles; safer gas tanks and safer storage for volatile materials; better tires; more efficient insulated windows, refrigerators and thermoses; lighter and more efficient frames of aircraft and trains.

Because the process itself is in broad use, it’s the companies that begin to incorporate these far-sighted processes into their current manufacturing and design schedules that will find themselves moving ahead of the competition.

A New Twist

The newest iteration of the aerogel revolution is what’s termed nanofoams. Even once through the nanofoam rabbit hole, there remain a variety of definitions. A new process developed in Australia came about accidentally while scientists were attempting to make fullerenes.

After blasting a laser at graphite in an argon gas chamber, scientists noticed that around 10,000 degrees C, when the carbon atoms separated out of the graphite, the separate carbon atoms settled into clusters as they cooled.

This nanofoam has several very bizarre magnetic properties. But it will be some time before any real implications can be gleaned from this foam; the foam degraded very quickly and was a byproduct of another process, so the scientists weren’t prepared to do much experimentation.

Its most exciting potential lies in the material’s semiconducting and magnetic properties. Should future work create a stable, magnetic semiconductor that can operate at room temperature from the nanofoam, another door will open that would revolutionize computing as we know it.

Spintronics

Basically, spintronics is a theoretical field of computing. It posits that if you could develop a computer that operated off magnetism (the spin of electrons) rather than electricity, you could actually create quantum computers that would be incredibly powerful, yet stunningly power efficient.

Already, major players like IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard are developing the next wave of magnetic random-access memory (MRAM). Last-generation, spintronic-based MRAM is incorporated into many notebook computer hard drives. But this next-generation step has the potential to be earth shattering.

Bear in mind, spintronics is still in its toddler years. The theoretical potentialities have yet to be fully explored, much less any blessed accidents that may occur along the way. But this is more than some pie-in-the-sky hope or snake oil hype. It’s tangible and big.

If you’re interested in getting a firmer grip on this field, its current players and its implications for the future of computing, the best places to start are the links below:

The Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation:

http://www.csqc.ucsb.edu/

New Scientist.com—the latest on spintronic switching:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424742.400

Scientific American.com--2002 in-depth article on spintronics:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007A735-759A-1CDD-B4A8809EC588EEDF

NVE Corporation—an MRAM builder

http://www.nve.com/