Making aerogel

this video has been sponsored by Ray Khan last year I started getting really interested in aerogel which is one of the lightest known materials there are many different types of aerogel but the most common one is from silica and that's what I have here by volume though it's actually less than 1% silica and over 99% of it is just air this makes it extremely light and when I'm holding it I can almost barely tell that it's there there are many potential uses for silica aerogel but its simplest and probably most common use is as a thermal insulator this is because it's mostly made of air which in general is a good insulator but the key part is that all this air is trapped in a network of silica this makes it really hard for the air molecules to move around and for the heat to transfer to the other side after watching a few videos about it mostly by veritasium I decided that I had to try making it myself on the surface the general process was relatively simple where all I had to do was make an alcohol based gel and then dry it however the issue is that in practice it's way more difficult and getting even a decent quality aerogel is really hard I had never done anything like this before but I had faith that I could do it to start my mission the first thing that I had to do was make the alcohol base gel which I thought was gonna be relatively easy however that really didn't turn out to be the case the first problem was that there wasn't just a perfect recipe for the gel and everyone seemed to have their own slightly different way of making it I wasn't looking for anything fancy though and I wanted it to be as easy as possible and it seemed like a recipe from aerogel Org fit that perfectly the first chemical that I needed for it was the hardest to get and it was something called tetraethyl orthosilicate or tea moss for short this is basically a liquid source of silica and because of that it's also really dangerous my favorite thing about it is that it reacts with water and turns back into silica and it can do this in both your lungs and your eyes the best part too is that the particles form in the eyes under the surface and there we eat too small to remove so we can lead to permanent blindness for this reason when I was going to be working with it I'd have to be very careful and to only use it under a fume hood this small bottle of it cost me about $100 and I ordered it from a chemical company now the other things that I needed were methanol and concentrated ammonia for the methanol I just bought it from a local hardware store and I got the ammonia on line with all the ingredients I was now ready to get started and the first thing that I had to do was make some dilute ammonia the stuff that I had here was concentrated so it was around 28 to 30 percent but I needed it to be closer to a round point one or point two to do this I just added five point four mils of the concentrated stuff to a bottle and poured in a leader of distilled water after this I moved on to making the actual gel solution and I added 33 mils of methanol to two beakers and then into the one on the left I also added sixteen point five mils of that dilute ammonia that I just made with this all added I then busted out the tea mas and I carefully poured in 33 mils to the one on the right this gave me my two starting solutions and to make the gel all I had to do was mix them so I turned on some strong stirring dumped one into the other and let it stir for about 30 seconds it didn't look like much was happening but there was a reaction going on and the tea mas was slowly turning back into silica at first the silica form does an extremely fine suspension of particles that were so small that they weren't even visible during this phase which was what I had here it was still completely liquid as more of it form though the particles would come together and form a complicated and fragile network of silica this network would have a lot of extremely small pores in it and these would trap some of the methanol and water this would cause a solution to thicken and eventually form a gel which is a mixture of a solid and a liquid before it became a gel though I had to pour it into a mold and I had less than 10 minutes to do this one of the simplest ways that I saw was by bent-over it applied science and he just cut the top off a syringe this way the extremely delicate gel could then be taken out of it by squeezing on the plunger this all seemed to work okay but my biggest issue with this method was that the gels were kind of ugly the major goal of this project was to make aerogel in general but I also wanted it to be as beautiful as possible the ones that you can buy are always these nice cubes or well-defined shapes and I wanted to get as close to that as I could so I had to somehow come up with a way to do this and this was the part that made making the gels a lot harder than I initially thought this is mostly because the final gels are really delicate to the point that I feel like they could break almost just by looking at them this totally ruled out using any of those soft silicone molds and it also would just get stuck in any hard mold so I wasn't able to use any traditional mold for this and I had to get a bit creative I spent about a week trying out random things and eventually I came up with something that worked it was also really cheap and easy and what I ended up using was a plastic cookie cutter that I got from Amazon I think it might have been okay on its own but to make sure that the gel didn't stick to it I sprayed it with a bunch of silicone lubricant and wiped it down after that I put it onto a piece of glass that I took out of my akia display cabinet and I made a border around it with duct tape with the tape in place I took away the cookie cutter and I used a dollar store cheese grater to shred one whole dollar store candle [Music] I then melted all the wax by blasting it with my heat gun which is basically an overpowered hairdryer when it all seemed nice and liquidy I used a ruler to scrape off the extra stuff and the goal was to make a layer about the thickness of the tape this part was always a little bit sloppy and I usually had to scrape it and remelt it at least a couple times it didn't have to be perfect though and all I wanted was for the glass to be covered in a somewhat even layer of wax when I felt that I had this I dropped the cookie cutter onto it and I put a dish on top to help keep it in place I then shot it again with the heat gun to really make sure that the edges were sealed and I let it sit there for 30 minutes for all the wax to harden at this point it still might not make sense how this was all gonna work but I promise that it will make sense in a few minutes also just to be clear this was all done well before even starting to make the gel solution because like I said before that starts to harden in less than 10 minutes but now cutting back to the gel solution that I made it had only been a couple minutes and I started filling the mold I found that the best amount to add was ten point four mils and I did this as fast as I could and then covered the whole thing with a dish as the reaction continued it would cause things to slowly heat up and without a cover the gels would all dry out and crack with the dish though the methanol vapor was kept inside and this problem seemed to be avoided what I had to do now was basically just wait for it all to turn into a gel this usually took around ten or fifteen minutes but just by looking at it it was very hard to tell when it was ready so I came up with a very scientific method to figure this out where I would occasionally just punch the table and see how it shook I also found that it was just good to punch the table in general because even early on it helped release some bubbles eventually around the 10-minute mark when I would hit the table it looked pretty solid when I saw this I would usually give it a few more minutes and then I would take off the dish and add some more methanol this had to be done quickly though because a lot of the methanol had vaporized and there wasn't much of it left on the surface right now they were all still way too fragile and if I tried moving them they would probably crack and fall apart so I let them sit there for another ten minutes which gave more time for the teemo's to react and for the gels to get stronger after that they all looked good to go so I took away the dish and now it was time to see why I put this whole weird setup together I first added some more methanol and then I carefully pulled on the corner of the mold and I cracked it away from the wax I then peeled off the rest of it and I was able to completely separate it without putting any real strain on the gels the gels were all still technically in the mold but there was now no bottom and I could easily get them out without damaging them all I had to do was push on them a bit and they slid out really easily they were all dropped directly into a bunch of fresh methanol and I went back to making some more gels however this time I didn't just use the same mold again and I instead used two hexagons one to set this up I started by adding a bit more wax and then it was pretty much the exact same as before when this was eventually ready I whipped up some more gel solution and again I added it in the same way the only difference was that this time the hexagons were slightly smaller so I added 8.8 mils instead when these were ready I cracked them off the wax and I added them all to the square gels what I had to do now was let all these gels soak in this methanol for at least a day and then swap it out for some fresh methanol with this setup it was thankfully quite easy and all I had to do was lift this strainer and drop it into a new dish that I had already felled I've seen a lot of people do this by individually moving each gel but I don't think that's the best method I've mentioned a few times now that they're extremely fragile and I feel that this would almost definitely damage them in my opinion using a strainer here was very important not only because it made it way easier and I can move them all at once but it also was a lot nicer on the gels as the gel sat there the water that was in them was being taken out and replaced by methanol the main goal was to replace all the water with methanol but this process was unfortunately very slow it would take about a week to be done where every day or second day I would lift it out and put it into some new methanol this part of the process was definitely the most wasteful and just to make these gels I had to use about 10 liters of methanol there wasn't much way around this though because I had to make sure that there was absolutely no water left I also do plan to recycle all of it by distilling it but still it was a lot of solvent to make such a small amount of gel after letting them soak for about a day I took out one of them to have a closer look at it when I started this project I was really hoping to make gels that were completely smooth but the surface of this one was a bit rough looking this happened because when I was making it I added the extra methanol a bit too early and the surface hadn't completely hardened this was a bit disappointing but it also didn't matter too much and it shouldn't be noticeable in the final aerogel after this I took a look at the hexagon one and I thought that it looked pretty good however I apparently a bit too hard on it and it broke and fell back into the methanol the whole gel making part was pretty much done and all I had to do was swap out the methanol a few more times after this the next major step was to drive the gels and replace all the methanol with air but just like everything in this project it wasn't super straightforward I wanted to see what would happen if I just tried evaporating the methanol and I also blew on it a bit to try to speed it up within a couple minutes it had cracked all the way through and when I tried pushing a bit on it the whole thing just exploded the cracking here happened really fast because I was blowing on it but I wanted to see what would happen if I let it evaporate much slower so I took another piece put it into a small dish and covered the top within a few hours it already started cracking and then over the next couple days it cracked even more and it also shrank a lot the major reason why this happened was because of something called capillary action this effect is seen with liquids and narrow tubes where if the liquid is attracted to the walls of the tube it will try to climb it the same things occurring with the methanol and the very small pores in the gel as the methanol evaporates at the surface the methanol deeper in the gel tries to move up its pores and fill its place this creates an inward pulling force on the walls of the pores and it causes a lot of them to contract or even collapse this also happens at different rates all over the gel which puts uneven forces on it and causes it to crack and shrink it was very hard and it felt like porous and crunchy glass what I thought was cool though was that it still had that slight blue haze that you see with aerogel then just for fun I added some water to it and it started popping like crazy after this I let it dry and what I was left with looked a lot like glass however it wasn't completely solid and it was still very porous but anyway that was kind of a tangent and the main point is that you can't just dry the gel in a normal way it has to be done using a specialized method so that it doesn't collapse on itself there are a couple ways to do this but I decided to go with the most common way which is by supercritical drying using co2 the general idea behind this process was to first replace all the methanol in the gel with liquid co2 the liquid co2 is then heated until it goes supercritical where it's kind of a mixture between the liquid and a gas then from there it can be converted to just plain co2 gas by doing this we're basically turning a liquid into a gas without having to evaporate it this makes it possible to completely avoid that problem with capillary action and the gel shouldn't collapse the methanol here was just being used as an intermediate because the liquid co2 isn't able to mix with water it is technically possible though to make methanol go supercritical but it's a lot more dangerous but with all that being said to actually do this I had to put together a specialized supercritical dryer and like the gel recipe I also got the information on how to do this from aerogel org they have a full guide and a complete parts list and they also have a lot of very useful information when it comes to making aerogel in general I decided to deviate a bit from their guide though and to build a slightly bigger chamber the main chamber of their larger version had an inner diameter of 1.5 inches but I decided to bump it up to 2 almost all these pieces were pretty specialized and I couldn't just buy them in any local hardware store the entire thing also had to be made out of high-pressure stainless steel which wasn't exactly cheap and unfortunately there wasn't much of a way around this because building it with cheaper materials especially those not rated for high pressures is a major safety problem unsuitable materials have failed and exploded and hurt people in the past and it's not something to take lightly but anyway with that being said I was able to order all these pieces online from a supplier called mcmaster-carr it all arrived a few days later and the first thing that I did was take everything out of its packaging and roughly lay it all out then had to connect all the pieces and to do this I first wrapped all the threads with teflon tape and then screwed them all together after this I attached a connector for a hose to a co2 tank and it was almost ready to go the last parts that I needed were sight windows that would be going on the sides these were very specialized pieces with glass in them which could take high temperatures and pressures and let me see what was going on inside the chamber they weren't mandatory at all though but it was gonna make the process a lot easier and I thought that also I might be able to get some cool footage in the chamber this second reason was actually what mattered to me more and it was why I built the bigger chamber in the first place a bigger chamber meant a bigger window and to me that probably meant better footage each of these windows were unfortunately expensive and they cost about 400 u.s. I was lucky though because they were in stock which they often aren't and they were shipped out right away they both arrived about a week later and I was ready to attach them to the chamber however to prevent leaks they first had to be loaded up with a bunch of teflon tape and it was recommended on aerogel org to wrap them four or five times after that I screwed them down as or as I could with my fingers and then I used the giant socket to crank them down it was important to use a socket here and not just a regular wrench because the force around the window had to be applied evenly a wrench would only have two main points of contact on it and this could cause some twisting strain which could either crack the glass or just weaken it I also marked their starting point so I would know how much I turned them according to the manufacturer it was safe to turn these up to three times but I never found that I needed to go more than one or one and a half after both of these were on that chamber was pretty much done but there was still one last thing that I needed for this whole supercritical drying process I needed liquid co2 so I had to go pick up a tank of it to the valve of it I attached a quick-release adapter tightened it down and snapped in the high-pressure hosing now coming back to the pressure chamber I snapped in the other end of the hose I then made sure that all the valves on the chamber were closed and I was now finally ready to test it out I started by opening the tank which led out liquid co2 and it filled the hosing I then opened the valve on the chamber and the co2 started rushing in the pressure gauge also increased and I let it max out at around 900 psi before closing it after this I shot all the joints with some soapy water to see if there were any leaks I was hoping that the chamber would just be perfect and it would all magically be fine but that definitely wasn't the case and there were bubbles forming everywhere like this it would probably still be safe to make the co2 go supercritical in it but it would also all just leak out and be close to useless so of course I had to fix this and it was actually pretty easy all I had to do was use much thicker teflon tape and tighten things a little bit more to empty the chamber I closed the co2 tank reopen the main valve and then slowly turned the one at the bottom [Music] this allowed me to vent all the co2 those in the system and only after this could I safely disconnect the housing the tape that I used this time was the much thicker orange one and it replaced most of the white tape in the whole setup I then retested all the joints and this time it was a lot better there was still a small amount of bubbling in some places and to fix this I just tightened it a bit more after that I tested its holding power by filling it with a bunch of liquid co2 and leaving it for a couple days I marked the height that it started at and when I came back it was only a bit lower there was always going to be some sort of leak in the system but as long as it maintained most of its level for at least a day it was more than fine after this the chamber was finally ready and I could do some supercritical drying the only problem that I still had though was that I didn't know how I was gonna be loading the gel into it from all the tutorials and the videos that I saw I couldn't understand how people were getting the gel inside we saw before how fragile it was but it seemed like everyone just threw it in and let it sit at the bottom in my mind there was no way that this wouldn't have damaged it also there was the other problem of taking the aerogel out after it was done which is also super fragile I spent a long time trying to come up with a solution and I decide to make a bent version of those things that they used to load pizzas into an oven to make this I just took a random piece of metal that I had lying around and I hammered it into the rough shape that I wanted I then used an angle grinder to shape it even more and I finished it up on a grinding wheel this was the final result and it wasn't perfect but it was honestly way better than I thought it would be at this point the chamber and everything about it was finally and totally done and the gels were done as well I'd finished cycling them all in the methanol and I was ready to turn them into aerogel so I started by filling the chamber with 45 mils of methanol and I pulled out one of the gels I then carefully lowered it in and I made sure that there was enough methanol to completely cover it I wiped down all the threads to get rid of any methanol that might have been there and I screwed on the window like before I first did this as tight as I could with my fingers and then I really cranked it down I then carefully carried the whole thing back to the stand and I attached the co2 hosing I also taped a camera to the window to film inside when I first tried this I used a phone because I assumed that a camera wouldn't be able to focus that close however the camera and lens that I was using apparently didn't have any problem I then opened the main tank and I carefully turned the valve so the liquid co2 would only trickle in the goal here was to fill it really slowly over the course of about an hour I was hoping that I'd be able to see the gel in the chamber but it was unfortunately just barely out of view I kind of expected that though because the gel was so low down and the windows were mostly just to help keep track of the liquid co2 for this whole supercritical drying part I found it very hard to find a decent procedure there didn't seem to be a lot of info available and I was only able to find a few complete ones the one on aerogel dorg was quite good but I wasn't sure about the quality of their final aerogel from the photos it all definitely worked but they looked like they had a lot of cracks and I ideally wanted mine to be crack free so what I ended up doing was combining their procedure with another one that I found and I also injected some of my own ideas one of the biggest factors when it came to making crack free aerogel seemed to be speed were slower was almost always better this was the main reason why I was adding the liquid co2 over the course of an hour if I added it too quickly and it makes too much with the methanol it could create stresses at the surface of the gel which could cause it to crack when it was barely over halfway full the liquid co2 usually stopped coming in and to get more I had to open this valve on the right doing this let some of the co2 gas out of the chamber lowered the pressure and it led more liquid co2 come in from the tank I only opened it a very small amount and when the chamber was eventually full I closed it again then I let it sit like this for 30 minutes it can be a bit hard to tell here but there are two layers where the liquid co2 is sitting on top of the methanol to make you more clear I went ahead and shook it a bit but this probably wasn't the best for the gel for the most part besides when I shook things these two solvents were completely separated and they were only slowly mixing together it wasn't enough for them to just blend together but a small amount of each of them was dissolving into the other this meant that the gel was only slowly getting introduced to the co2 which again was a good thing when I came back thirty minutes later they've clearly mixed quite a bit and the methanol layer had expanded it was always kind of hard to tell exactly where the methanol was but it had clearly shifted up and the light was getting warped in a different place they were still mostly separated though and because methanol was more dense it was sitting at the bottom this was convenient because the next step was to drain it and it meant that all I had to do was open the valve at the bottom of the chamber this again had to be done really slowly and the target was to do it in about two-and-a-half hours when I stopped seeing methanol dripping out the co2 in the chamber was just above the gel and I closed the valve when I was done I checked how much methanol I had and it was about 40 mils I started with 45 mils though so there was still some methanol mixed in with the co2 in the chamber some of the methanol also probably got vaporized as it came out and just went into the air so for this reason it was really important to do this in a well-ventilated area to avoid breathing in a bunch of methanol I refilled it again slowly over the course of about thirty minutes and I brought it up above the window then after that I let it sit overnight and I waited for the methanol that was still in the gel to slowly get swapped for the co2 when I came back the next day it looked pretty much the same and I opened the valve at the bottom I collected everything but this time it was mostly co2 I was getting mostly dry ice which was forming as the liquid co2 was leaving the valve under normal atmospheric pressure liquid co2 can't exist so as it left the chamber it jumped to being a solid when I got the level down just above the gel I refilled it in the exact same ways before and left it overnight this time after all the dry ice had disappeared I had just a couple mils of methanol in the beaker the basic goal here was to keep repeating this process over and over until I didn't see anything in the beaker and then to do it one last time in total I usually had to do this three or four times which meant that I soaked it overnight three or four times I started this run on Sunday and it was only by Thursday that it was ready after all this the gel should be filled with only liquid co2 and no methanol and definitely no water I was finally ready to actually super critically dry it so I closed all the valves on the chamber and I closed the tank itself now two super critically dry the gel the general idea was really simple almost all I had to do was heat it up and push the liquid co2 into the supercritical state with co2 this thankfully happened at a low temperature and it was barely above room temperature at around 31 C for this part I used a heat gun and I carefully blasted the chamber almost all of the heat was focused on the largest section and a small amount was on the small cross for safety reasons it was important not to heat any of the valves the main goal here was to get it to 31 C but as it got hotter the pressure also increased I had to make sure that by the time it got to 31 c that the pressure was just below 1,100 psi but this was a bit tricky the amount that the pressure increased all depended on how much liquid co2 I started with the more co2 there was the more the pressure would increase and it was always slightly different between runs if it ended up going too high I would have had to relieve the pressure by opening a valve but what I started with turned out to be pretty close to perfect to prevent the gel from cracking I also first brought it up to 28 C held it there for 20 minutes and then brought it up to 31 this whole part took about 45 minutes and during this time the surface of the co2 was constantly changing the boundary between the liquid co2 and the gas above it started out as being very evident but it slowly disappeared this was because as the temperature and the pressure increased there was less and less of a difference between the density of the gas and the density of the liquid the co2 gas in there was getting denser and the liquid was expanding and getting less dense eventually at the super critical point of 31 C these two phases of co2 had the same density and they were able to mix together this new mixture was supercritical co2 and it had properties that were a combination of a liquid and a gas it was able to dissolve stuff like a liquid but it was also able to diffuse and to move around like a gas the most important property though was that as a supercritical fluid it had effectively no surface tension and without a surface tension this meant that it wasn't possible to have capillary action and we shouldn't have that problem with the gel trying to crush itself it was a lot harder to see in the chamber than I expected and the supercritical transition was honestly not as clear as I hoped it would be on my second channel though I did a much more in-depth video about supercritical co2 in general I also did it in something that made it a lot easier to see what was going on and if you're interested in checking it out there's a link in the description but anyway after reaching the supercritical point it wasn't even close to being done I still had to heat it a lot more and push the co2 further into the supercritical region this had to be done extremely slowly and carefully by only raising it by a few degrees and then waiting twenty or thirty minutes doing this as slow as possible was very important because it was the best way to avoid cracking the gel even though all the co2 in the gel was super critical when it's heated up it still expands and if it's done too quickly it would just break it this was the scheme that I tried to follow where each temperature interval was held for at least 20 minutes as the temperature increased so did the pressure and at 39 and 53 see I had to carefully open the valve on the right and vent some of the co2 I eventually got it to 6dc and at this point everything in the chamber was well above the critical point and deep in the supercritical region if I did everything right the gel would hopefully still be uncracked and it would be filled evenly with hot supercritical co2 what I had to do next was the last and most important step and that was to get rid of all the co2 to do this I just had to open the valve and vent it but it had to be done very carefully if the pressure dropped too quickly the pressure outside in the gel could become less than the inside and it could cause it to explode or crack so I opened this valve almost as little as I possibly could and I slowly depressurized it as the pressure decreased all the co2 in the chamber gradually moved out of the supercritical area all the co2 though was still quite hot so instead of turning back into liquid co2 it was all going back into regular co2 gas as a gas it also has no surface tension and it should be able to leave the gel without causing any damage it took an hour and a half to completely depressurize it and over this time I had to constantly check on it and adjust the valve when the pressure was eventually at zero I completely opened the valve took away the camera and removed the hosing I brought it all over to my vice and unscrewed the window and now it was time to see if all this work was worth it as I pulled it out it didn't look like it had shrank or anything which was definitely a good sign so at the very least I had made some sort of aerogel when I got it out more though I notice that there were unfortunately at least a few major cracks in it but despite this I was still pretty happy with how it turned out I mean it wasn't even close to being perfect but for my first attempt I thought it was pretty good from all this though my main conclusion was that this process kind of sucked it took about four days just to prepare the gel in the chamber and then it took an entire day just for the supercritical part it was also very labor intensive and I had to babysit at the entire time and I couldn't really do anything else also on top of this using a heat gun wasn't really ideal because it was only able to get one side of the chamber I unfortunately wasn't able to see the gel the whole time so I don't have a lot of proof of this but I feel like it was just this supercritical step that really caused the gel to crack I wanted to try doing it again but instead of just doing the same thing I decided to try something new this time I didn't use a heat gun and I instead bought a sous-vide meat cooker this thing was originally meant to cook things like steak but I felt that it would be perfect here it had a built-in temperature controller so all I had to do was put the chamber in the water with it and then click a button so to get this started I loaded the chamber with a hexagon this time and I repeated the same exchange steps using the liquid co2 when it was done I lowered the entire chamber into a tub of water and I attached the sous-vide cooker I then added as much water as I could but I was only able to cover half of the main chamber this was fine though because the part where the gel was was completely covered as well as a decent portion above it this would give me good temperature control and consistency in the part that it mattered the most even though the upper part wasn't in the water it would still heat up because the whole thing was made of metal however it would also lose a lot of heat to the air which wasn't good to try and fix this I loosely covered the whole thing with aluminum foil which would help hold an insulating pocket of air this wasn't a perfect solution but it would let the top part roughly match the temperature of the bottom and that was all I needed after this I was ready to get things going and all I had to do was turn on the cooker this entire process in terms of heating was similar to what I did with the heat gun I had to keep raising it by a few degrees and then waiting about 20 minutes however this time the major difference was that I barely had to do anything I just occasionally clicked on the cooker a few times to turn up the temperature and that was it what was interesting was that without the camera right against the window this super critical part looked a lot different for some reason when the camera was super close it wasn't possible to see the blue haze that it made at the super critical point unfortunately though I didn't plan to film any of this and everything here was just done last minute using my phone what was also weird was that at some point it all turned orange inside the chamber but there was no orange light anywhere then as it got further past a super critical point this color slowly disappeared I vented it at 46 and 53 C and I eventually got the temperature up to 62 once it was there I didn't need the hot water anymore and I pulled out the chamber I was now able to get a decent angle to look inside but I was only able to see a small part of the jowl it was completely uncracked which was a very good sign but I had no idea what the other part of it looked like to get rid of all the co2 i just opened the valve and I vented it over the course of an hour and a half I also used a screwdriver to help turn the valve a lot more precisely as I vented it I kept looking at the gel and it looked the same even after all the co2 was gone after seeing that I honestly started to get really excited but again it was just a small portion of the gel and I tried to not get my hopes up too much now that it was empty I carried the whole thing over to my vice I then unscrewed the window and I took a look inside and well I guess my hopes weren't destroyed from what I could tell it was completely uncracked and I could honestly barely believe it I really did think that this one would be cracked as well and I thought that it was just gonna be a bit less than the last one what I had here though in my opinion was about as close to perfect as it could have possibly been it was slightly yellow though and I'm not sure if this was because of the recipe that I used or because the gel was really old I originally made them back in November and this run was done in March so they weren't exactly fresh my personal opinion is that it's probably from the recipe and not the age but I don't have any real evidence to prove that either way though I finally did it I started working on this project back in July and it has taken a long time to fix all the problems and to get all the supplies I was extremely lucky that it worked after just two real attempts but it took months and months of constantly reading stuff and trying little things I was really happy with the final result and the only issue that I saw were some small bubbles in it but those are from when I made the original gel I didn't think they'd be visible in the final aerogel but I mean they obviously were in the future I might try to fix that and I also might try to modify the chamber so that I can load more gels in my opinion even with the sous-vide cooker it was still way too much work just to dry one and I'm convinced there's a way to do up to four however for now I'm a bit tired of thinking and working on aerogel and that probably won't happen for another year now on a bit more of a personal note projects like these kind of destroy my soul they can take months of work to film and just finish the project and then it usually takes at least a couple weeks to edit it all together this isn't at all a complaint though because they're always worth it in the end but for over a year now I felt like I need to work on some smaller and less serious projects I've also felt like I wanted to show more of what goes on behind the scenes because there's so much more happening that the camera never captures so in February I decided that I'd finally make it happen and I hired a friend of mine as a cameraman and editor since then we've already completed a few projects and the first video of this new type was released a few weeks ago it was completely different than what I would normally do so I posted it on my second channel Nile blue because I want to keep this type of content completely separate from the main stuff the goal of these videos is to still be scientific and educational but to also show a lot more of the fun side of practical science however the only issue is that that channel basically makes no money and unlike Nile red it also has no patreon support thankfully though I've been able to get some nice sponsors on this channel like Rey Khan who are making Niall blue possible Rey Khan makes wireless headphones and earbuds and they recently sent me a pair of their new 25s to test out they showed up in this nice little box and I was able to bluetooth pair them with my phone in less than 30 seconds without even reading any of the instructions I've tried them out for the last couple of weeks while working in the lab and so far I've really liked them they have good base six hours of battery life and they're comfortable to wear for a long time also this is kind of a niche thing but I like that I'm able to just use one of them and I can turn the other one off this is because while I'm in the lab for safety reasons I can't block both ears in terms of cost they're also surprisingly affordable and despite sounding just as good they start at half the price of other premium wireless earbuds but with all that being said I definitely recommend checking out Ray Khan you should also use my link buy rake on comm slash Nile red which will give you 15% off your order if you choose to pick some up and now this is finally the end of the longest video that I've ever made I hope you guys enjoyed it and I'll see you on the next one as usual a big thanks goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see all my new videos at least 24 hours before I post them to YouTube you'll also get access to all the older videos that I had to take down and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music] [Music]

Channel: NileRed

Views: 8,303,123

Rating: 4.9258952 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, science, chemistry, aerogel, silica, aero, gel, supercritical, co2, drying, pressure chamber, TMOS, nilered

Id: Y0HfmYBlF8g

Length: 43min 56sec (2636 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Lichewitz]

I wish so much I could hang out with Nile a bit, maybe synthesize something. He seems to be a genuinely nice person and fun to talk to

[u/dumbassh03trash]

Nilered is daddy.

[u/Sylieence]

I made hydrophobic aerogel to study his ability to absorb organic molecules. Very interesting stuff but I didn't have access to a pressurizable oven. I didn't need big chunk of aerogel but i would loved to have one.

https://imgur.com/a/tvYtjJt

[u/QinlynnLavellan]

Thought this was the subnautica subreddit for a second there

[u/Hairyurinal]

So it’s a Lays bag but in a different form

[u/AyrtonSenna]

0230 - I should save this for the morning
0315 - I should have been a chemist

[u/IA_EGG]

Who just has 2k to buy and make a pressure chamber? YouTube must be very lucrative at his level.

[u/eleitl]

Less known uses of specialized aerogels: fusion nuclear weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK

[u/Mondeleev]

Nicely done!