I Waterproofed Myself With Aerogel!

I feel confident You're confident that I am NOT gonna be damaged? not permanently okay let me back up for a moment. I want to talk about the properties of aerogel the world's lightest solid. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lean in so it's coming in through this mic and then can you do that again yeah this is what it sounds like that is weird it has a metallic ring first recognized by aerogel's inventor Samuel Kistler all the way back in 1931. now aerogel is an excellent thermal insulator but it's not the easiest material to work with can I try it sure oh I didn't I don't quite have the touch oh I can't I make it ring oh no look it didn't take a whole lot to break it right it breaks pretty easily so is there a way to take the extraordinary thermal insulation of aerogel but make it more usable what I put together here is just a combination of aerogel particles silica aerogel particles and a non-flammable binder and you should be able to put it on your your skin and hit yourself with the torch should right I'll give it a shot okay so you just take a little bit and squeeze it around your finger just around yeah just squeeze it around here one finger a two fingers you want matter how's that am I am i doing it oh yeah that's that's yeah I'll be good just wanna make sure the fire when it goes around your finger doesn't hit the Bearskin seems like it's pretty thin around this finger tip here like how thick should it be you're making me nervous holding a blowtorch can I do the blowtorching or you can do the blowtorching absolutely because I mean if this is if this goes wrong so how hot is a blowtorch flame well it's really hard to tell but from our experience it's usually you know at least 1500 degrees C and can get as hot as 2000 so yeah this is very hot all right let's try it this is so wrong that little jittery pot there I you know it looks like I'm toasting a marshmallow whoa why is it flaming like that and what is burning binder right now correct should people just hold the rate on there it doesn't feel hot at all my finger does not feel hot at all that is insane right there propriety I cannot believe how a little warmth I feel passing through that the FLIR 10 2013 10 per ature ranges and here the aerogel is clearly hotter than the 160 degrees Celsius upper limit I mean it's glowing orange hot so it's clearly incredibly hot I mean if you can see the blackbody radiation you know that it's very hot so we went to the highest temperature range so this goes up to 2,000 Celsius 881 907 907 907 degrees Celsius that is absurd pretty good right in front of my finger what so this was was about almost a thousand Celsius but behind this thin layer of aerogel my fingers are just just warm Wow I mean it is clear this stuff insulates this video is about taking air gels extraordinary properties and improving on them for example I'm about to step into this pool without getting wet there's a layer of air there right next to my skin that thin layer of air is what makes my skin looks silvery light from certain angles reflects off the water air interface in what's called total internal reflection that is very strange this is a really cool effect I mean just besides the fact that I'm basically waterproof I feel like this extra air on me is making me more buoyant than usual let me try coming out by the water and see if I'm still dry that is true I don't I don't really feel wet at all that was weird really weird so how did I make myself waterproof I did it with aerogel particles by taking a bucket of them and coating myself with the tiny best but this is a kind of strange way to become waterproof because normal silica aerogel is hydrophilic there we go now this is a hydrophilic aerogel so all those OAH groups inside the aerogel are absorbing the liquid and causing the aerogel structure to collapse aerogel is really good at absorbing water for two reasons first it contains a lot of surface area due to its nano scales sponge-like structure an ice cube sized piece of aerogel contains half a football field of surface area that makes it good at absorbing lots of molecules something scientists have sought to exploit my favorite application which I still think today is a good idea is what's the idea is a a physical insecticide so most insecticides work by being neurotoxins they're called cholinesterase inhibitors it's the same mechanism as nerve gas and we spray this on crops and things but a physical insecticide works by basically getting stuck to the outer skin of the insect and and basically sucking all the moisture the or the oils out of them to the point where they just sort of dry out to death it's kind of like putting salt on a Sluggers yeah that's a very good analogy exactly the other reason it's good at absorbing water specifically is because it's structure is covered with OAH groups which attract water molecules and that makes it ideal for use in museums in the past I've been working with a company in Italy called opium which makes Museum cases I mean they made the case for Mona Lisa they are interested in putting aerogels in the cases because it's a passive moisture a regulator essentially once you have it inside if the moisture increases the original a lot of it if it decreases it releases some of it air gels ability to absorb is even being used right now to help detect Mars quakes these were the ones that were made for the NASA insight mission this aerogel looks like chalk because so-called zeolite particles are dispersed throughout it they can absorb moisture even at very low pressures there's a seismometer that contains three small seismometers and requires since they're so small they require exceptional vacuum inside otherwise the motion get stamped so that's what we developed this for the zoo lights were helping absorb the moisture predominantly that was coming off of the hypotheses and gave me some gassing different things so that is it's sort of maintaining the vacuum by keeping - pulling things it's actually a vacuum ball if you think of it that way and what's interesting about it is it does not require any power any consumptions very light so essentially this is what enabled the inside mission to work aerogel can absorb up to 25 times its weight in water but for some applications this is less than ideal so once we've done this is that piece of aerogel ruined now pretty much yeah that's that's entropy irreversible damage there to counteract this issue we take a hydrophobe it's a reactive chemical that when it touches a no H group spontaneously rearranges with that o age group and creates this big non-polar group and that repels water so by replacing just 30% of the Oh H groups that line the inside of the aerogel with these hydrophobic groups you can make an aerogel that perfectly repels water so here water bounces off it's totally impervious it does not penetrate in and it can sit on water for months and it will be just the same as if it was never wetted at all you ready I guess let's go shot there it goes it feels funny cuz it like it hardly feels like the water is touching me because in a way the water isn't touching it's not touching you that's what's amazing at the molecular level it is being repelled look how crazy that it's like a weird laminar flow this is so trippy so aerogel can be made impervious to water or more adsorbent it is naturally brittle but it can be worked into a sticky paste and so far I've really only focused on silica aerogel but air gels can be made out of all sorts of different materials so all of these materials are nano structured that's right and they have nano sized pores around 20 nanometers in size that's right and they are over 50% err correct which is why they're also light lightweight yeah some of them are made of polymers and there is a trade-off between thermal and mechanical properties a traditional silica aerogel is typically around 15 milliwatts per meter Kelvin thermal conductivity so that means about 3 times 2 to 3 times better insulating than styrofoam these materials would be between one and a half to two times more insulating than styrofoam somewhere around 20 to 26 milliwatts per meter Kelvin this is a poly a madero gel this chemistry came from NASA so it's a great insulating material but it's not flammable knock on it it feels like wood internally we call it Martian tape another way to make aerogel more workable is to incorporate it into composite materials like blankets something that's in between silicon and silica that feels nice it feels very nice doesn't this feels like almost like a stuffed animal yeah exactly so this is a new type of aerogel blanket that in the future we may find in something like an astronaut suit or maybe even apparel what this material is actually it's fiberglass it does feel like it's a fiberglass that's been infused with aerogel and so that fiberglass aerogel composite so because aerogels are traditionally very fragile bike um positing it with the fiberglass allows you to make something that can be flexed and cut and sewn and wrapped it's not the most cuddly it it sheds dust when you tap on it but go ahead and dust is that that's silica aerogel to morphus silica and it's it's very safe it's not for example like quartz fiber or asbestos which are you know long aspect-ratio fibers that the body has no chemical means or physical means of breaking down this stuff is readily captured and and expelled by the body and it's it's not dangerous and this is what they use to insulate subsea oil pipelines and refineries and all sorts of applications so just that thickness will insulate a pipeline yeah so that thickness that that one this is one centimeter thick in one centimeter you get the same effective insulation value as three centimeters over an inch of mineral wool or fiberglass by itself so it's a tremendously better insulator this blanket is actually what I'm gonna put to the test in the final episode of the aerogel trilogy so subscribe if you don't want to miss it

Channel: Veritasium

Views: 11,925,879

Rating: 4.9033141 out of 5

Keywords: veritasium, science, physics, aerogel, waterproof, fireproof, blowtorch

Id: GcdB5bFwio4

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/d1msum4u]

How does he get it off of his body afterwards?

[u/chrisms150]

I feel like this stuff may be not the best to be breathing in/otherwise getting into your body. Nanostructures can do some weird shit with your cells... I'd probably not rub it all over me.

[u/sbvp]

“Whats the non flammable binder?” “proprietary”

[u/shrlytmpl]

I'm surprised there was no mention of potentially putting it inside firefighter suits.

[u/big_troublemaker]

So yes, those videos with guys rubbing aerogel on their skin and playing with it, will pop up on r/wtf in a few years time when we do find out that aerogel dust is highly cancerogenic, just as with those old school asbestos ads.

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...And I sincerely hope that this will not be the case, looks like potential next gen of hydrofobic treatment solutions.

[u/LostTank84]

When will they have dildos made from this?

[u/getmedownfromhere]

What does this do to his drag in the water? Is it near zero?

[u/spokale]

So like asbestos but less kill-y?

[u/fourAMrain]

The pool was so bizarre