Invest In Materials of the Future Today
By Nick Hodge
Friday, July 15th, 2011
Friday, July 15th, 2011
Aerogel is a Styrofoam-like material made by extracting the liquid component of a gel to form a solid.
The result is the most dense, porous solid known to man.
It's so light and strong, a two-gram mass of aerogel can support a five-pound brick.
It can be made from silica, carbon, aluminum, oxygen and other gels, depending on desired end use.
And the list of end uses is already long — and growing...
Aerogels can be used to absorb heavy pollutants like mercury, cadmium, and lead from water. They can make multi-layered supercapacitors and catalysts for fuel cells. NASA is using them as filters to trap space dust particles. They can be used as thickening agents in paints and cosmetics.
Above all else, they are best suited to be insulators. And that's where the early money will be made.
Because they are composed almost entirely of gas, which is a poor heat conductor, aerogels nearly eliminate all three types of heat transfer: convection, conduction, and radiation.
One company is already dominating the market.
Aspen Aerogels has tripled its revenue since 2006, counting ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM), Petrobras (NYSE: PBR), Shell (NYSE: RDS-A), and Dow Chemical (NYSE: DOW) as insulation customers.
Its aerogel insulation comes in thin-blanket form and offers up to five times the thermal performance of competitor products.
I'm anxiously awaiting the company's $150 million IPO, which it filed for in late June.
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