BOSTON, MA—The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded Boston-based Aerogel Technologies, LLC a patent for a revolutionary new type of aerogel that, for the first time, is simultaneously waterproof, fireproof, mechanically durable, dust-free, and free of halogens.

Made of up to 99+% air by volume, aerogels are the world’s lightest solids—essentially nanoporous foams with air pockets so small that heat cannot pass through them by convection. This makes aerogels not only the world’s lowest-density materials but also the world’s best thermal and acoustic insulators.

Most forms of aerogel to date have been based on silica, the same substance that makes up glass. In addition to low thermal conductivity, silica aerogels exhibit numerous useful materials properties, including hydrophobicity and nonflammability. But like glass, silica aerogel-based materials are incredibly brittle, and products based on them are likewise extremely dusty. Despite this drawback, industrial insulation products such as fiberglass blankets infused with silica aerogel have proven extremely valuable in a wide variety of markets ranging from energy infrastructure to daylighting. Over the past fifteen years, aerogels based on organic polymers have become commercially available as well, however were more susceptible to moisture and fire than their inorganic counterparts.

Now, aerogel manufacturer Aerogel Technologies has developed a new type of aerogel based on a novel waterproof nonflammable polymer with the durability of plastic. The new aerogel, sold under the trade name Airloy^® H116, is made of a specially engineered polyimide and can be produced as shaped 3D forms, coherent thin films, or conformal coatings, and can be composited with other materials such as foams, textiles, and felts to produce a multitude of useful market-ready products. The company states that the new material is 100x better at resisting moisture than previous polyimide aerogels, absorbing less than just 9% its weight in water after being submerged for 24 h compared to the over 900% water uptake typically seen with polyimides. And, unlike many other waterproof polymers, Airloy H116 is free of fluorine, chlorine, and other halogens—a game-changer amidst growing concerns surrounding the environmental impacts of fluorinated substances such as PFCs, PFAS, and CFCs.

The newly issued patent, US patent number 12,146,031, also covers the world’s first launderable aerogel, which reportedly can be washed in a commercial washing machine with detergent and dried in a clothes dryer without its nanoporous structure collapsing or materials properties degrading.

“This stuff is truly amazing,” said Aerogel Technologies CEO Dr. Stephen Steiner. “This new material finally fulfills so many of the promises of aerogel where previous materials fell short.” Steiner sees huge potential for the new aerogel in applications including electric vehicle battery packs, urban air mobility, airline interior components, bulletproof vests, and apparel.

The company says samples of products based on Airloy H116 including flexible sheets, compliant foams, and machinable panels are now commercially available through its ecommerce site BuyAerogel.com. The company says larger volumes are also available on a B2B basis as well.

Links:

• US Patent 12,146,031 on Justia
• Airloy H116 Tiles on BuyAerogel.com
• Airloy HR Rollable Sheet on BuyAerogel.com
• Airloy HT Flexible Foam on BuyAerogel.com

BOSTON, MA—Boston-based manufacturer Aerogel Technologies, LLC has announced construction of the world’s first pilot plant for volume production of large, mechanically robust polymer aerogel panels and films, to be built in the City of Boston. The company says the first stage of its new advanced manufacturing facility is expected to come online by May 2019.

“We are thrilled to bring large-dimension polymer aerogels to scale for the first time and in doing so bring measurable energy- and cost-savings benefits to applications around the world,” said Dr. Stephen Steiner, President & CEO of Aerogel Technologies. “Thanks to this new pilot plant, applications for aerogels ranging from more fuel-efficient airplanes to longer-range electric vehicles are finally within reach.”

With their new manufacturing facility, Aerogel Technologies says the company will immediately begin scale production of large-dimension aerogel panels in sizes initially ranging from 1 ft x 1 ft to 4 ft by 4 ft for use in aviation interiors, automotive parts, and lightweighting of engineering components currently made from performance plastics. The company states that the plant, which uses a unique patent-pending process that enables aerogels to be made in theoretically unlimited dimensions, emphasizes automation-first principles and leverages an easy-to-scale modular design that is 30x less costly than traditional infrastructure used to manufacture aerogels and that is 6x less expensive to operate.

Aerogel Technologies says the newly-announced pilot plant is the first stage of a larger planned facility that, when completed, will have a maximum annual capacity of approximately 2.3 million square feet of 3/8”-thick panels with capability for accommodating other form factors including up to 10 million square feet of aerogel thin films annually. In support of the new plant, the company recently relocated its operations into an expanded 100,000-sq-ft facility that was previously part of Westinghouse in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston.

Aerogels are the world’s lightest solid materials, composed of up to 99.98% air by volume, known for their unparalleled thermal insulating abilities and numerous other extreme materials properties. While NASA has used aerogels for space missions for several decades, commercial forms of aerogels have only been available for about 15 years and have been limited to silica aerogel-based materials in the form of loose fine particles and aerogel-infused fibrous blankets useful almost exclusively for thermal insulating applications such as subsea oil pipelines and energy-efficient construction projects.

In recent years, Aerogel Technologies has brought to market a new class of aerogel materials based on organic polymers rather than silica that exhibit plastic-like durability and machinability which can serve as ultralight alternatives to plastics and composites providing weight- and cost-savings advantages in applications such as aviation interiors, automotive range extension, and vibration isolation of rocket payloads. Sold under the tradename Airloy, the company describes their materials as being 3-15x lighter than plastics or composites yet exhibiting the durability expected of engineering materials while simultaneously offering 2-3x better thermal insulating performance than Styrofoam or fiberglass and up to 1000x better soundproofing than any other material.

In February of this year, Aerogel Technologies announced a major technological breakthrough that enables, for the first time, production of plastic-like aerogels without the need for the costly and size-restricting high-pressure equipment traditionally required to make aerogels. The company describes their new patent-pending technology as being able to produce aerogels of theoretically unlimited dimensions where previous technology was practicably limited to only handheld-sized parts, and at a fraction of the cost of the traditional high-pressure process.

Since their February announcement, Aerogel Technologies reports having received overwhelming demand for its new large-dimension Airloy materials. In response, the company reports it secured a round of private capital to finance construction of its new pilot plant in order to quickly scale production. With its newly announced manufacturing capability, Aerogel Technologies says it will now be able to fulfill pent up demand for mechanically strong aerogels in fields including aviation interiors, automotive components, advanced communications systems and antennas, construction, and apparel. The company reports several major product development efforts already underway with industry-leading companies including Airbus, Ford Motor Company, and several others.

Steiner states that Aerogel Technologies is committed to American manufacturing and to next-generation blue-collar job creation in America. “In our opinion, there’s no better place in the world to manufacture advanced materials than the United States. The talent, the creativity, the technology, the financial resources, the market opportunities—there’s no better place. It’s our hope that this pilot plant will serve as a first step towards creating a sustainable pipeline of well-paying manufacturing jobs for American families for years to come.”

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Composed of up to 99.9% air by volume, aerogels are also known as the world’s best thermal insulators—so effective that they have been used by NASA to protect the electronics of the Mars rovers from the frigid temperatures of the Red Planet and by the oil and natural gas industry to keep subsea oil pipelines warm. To date, however, aerogels have been too challenging and too expensive to make in sizes large enough to serve as structural materials in applications where plastics and composites are currently used.

Now researchers at Boston-based Aerogel Technologies, LLC have developed a new manufacturing technology that, for the first time, enables production of aerogels with plastic-like durability in theoretically unlimited dimensions. The technique opens the possibility of using aerogels as lightweight structural materials for a wide range of new applications at price points that the company projects will soon be cost-competitive with performance plastics like polycarbonate.

Aerogels have traditionally been made using a technique called supercritical drying—a high-pressure process performed in expensive stainless steel reactors that is also used in decaffeination of coffee and green dry cleaning. But just as the size of a pizza is limited to the size of the oven it’s baked in, to date aerogels have been limited to the size of the supercritical dryers used to make them. As a result, aerogels have been restricted to parts of only a few inches and no greater than about 24 inches x 24 inches (60 cm x 60 cm) at the very largest.

Using their new technique, Aerogel Technologies has produced a whopping 36 in x 36 in x 0.4 in (90 cm x 90 cm x 1 cm) aerogel panel, the world’s largest aerogel to date. The aerogel, made of a proprietary polymer, weighed in at an impressive 7x lighter than typical plastics yet still exhibited the same materials properties as aerogels made using the traditional method. Aerogel Technologies says that because the new technique is performed at ambient conditions and does not require a high-pressure reactor, there is no limit to the size of aerogel parts that can now be produced. The company says that aerogels up to 15x lighter than plastics that exhibit 34% better insulating ability than Styrofoam and up to 1000x more soundproofing ability than any other existing soundproofing materials have been made using the new technique.

The company plans to use the new technology to scale its Airloy^® line of aerogels, materials the company describe as combining the strength and durability expected of engineering materials with the low density and superlative insulating properties of aerogels in forms that can be machined, are dust-free, and are water-resistant. Aerogel Technologies is already selling 12-inch (30-cm) panels of their Airloy materials made using the new technology at pre-scale prices through their website BuyAerogel.com. The company says it is currently working to scale the process to produce aerogel panels with dimensions up to 6 ft x 10 ft (about 2 m x 3 m) in thicknesses up to 2 inches (5 cm).

“We call it the dawn of the Airloy age,” said Dr. Stephen Steiner, President and CEO of Aerogel Technologies. “Thanks to this new manufacturing technology, aerogels can now be thought of as ultralight plastics replacements that simultaneously provide superinsulating and soundproofing properties in a single material envelope.”

The company imagines using the technology to lighten everything from airplane wall panels to undercarriages for cars. Citing an example of the potential of the new technology, Aerogel Technologies claims that replacing just 10% of the plastics used in the interior of a Boeing 737 with Airloy materials could save an airline the size of Southwest $500 million to $1 billion a year in fuel costs alone.

Steiner says making the world’s largest aerogel is just the beginning. The company is now partnering with manufacturers in a variety of industries to integrate aerogels made with the new technology into commercial applications.

For questions about Aerogel Technologies please contact media@aerogeltechnologies.com or visit aerogeltechnologies.com.

For questions about partnering with NASA and technology licensing opportunities at NASA Glenn Research Center, please contact Amy Hiltabidel at amy.hiltabidel@nasa.gov or visit nasa.gov.