Saturday, October 29, 2011

Supercritical drying chamber for aerogel production



I built a pressure chamber from 2" pipe fittings and 1/8" brass valves to contain supercritical CO2 for drying applications. One project is to try aerogel production which generally requires that solvent be removed via supercritical drying. Normal evaporation would deform the aerogel structure as the surface tension of the solvent pulls the gel's structure tighter together and makes it dense. Since supercritical fluids have gaseous properties, they can diffuse out through the gel without affecting the structure the way that a liquid would.

4 comments:

Steven said...

Nice video. I'll be quite interested to see the aerogel manufacture, too. I'm pretty fascinated with aerogels, though I don't know exactly what I'd do with some if I had it :-).

Sam Sunners said...

You're trying to make silica aerogel, right?

shotgunner said...

why not fill from the bottom?

Anonymous said...

I think an interesting aerogel project you could try is making x-aerogel (not a xerogel) according to aerogel.org they are very strong compared to a normal aerogel but have a much lower insulation value.

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