Aerogels

[jome]

Pondering if this is a science or equipment question, but just throwing this out there for discussion.

I'd never heard of aerogels before, but stumbled upon it on a non-dive related context. But the first thing that came to my mind was that this would be perfect for wetsuits.

The classic form is very brittle, but there are recent developments that look very interesting:
http://www.aerogel.org/?p=1058

Thermal resistance and compressive strain of underwater aerogel?syntactic foam hybrid insulation at atmospheric and elevated hydrostatic pressure

So far I couldn't find any manufacturer to actually try to put it on a wetsuit. Any DIY-guys out there up for the challenge?

 

[jome]

Did find this, extremely cool (even though it's concerning dry suits)
Rubicon Research Repository: Item 123456789/3487

 

[trux]

Looks interesting! I asked my brother chemist who works for a big chemical corporation, if he could find more information or prices of such material, so I will post if he finds something, but am afraid that it is still just in the state of laboratory tests, and that it may take quite a while before such materials are commercially available.

 

[jome]

Did find this Navy experiment at trying to build a wetsuit from an aerogel/neoprene hybrid (sorts of)
http://www.google.fi/url?sa=t&sourc...sg=AFQjCNGuD5b_OxtnXUt7WMS67gyQBRa2mw&cad=rja

(hope that monster of an url links ok, it's a fun paper with battery heated tube-suits and all

While for this purpose the experiment was deemend partly a failure (or rather out of scope for the paper), there was one interesting tidbit:
The essence of this material is that although it does not have superior insulation to foam neoprene at the waters surface, it does not compress with depth and thus maintains its insulation characteristic, as opposed to foam neoprene



To us "elite" freedivers of course even more interesting than not losing insulation characteristic with depth (as compared to neoprene) is no buoyancy change! The mother of all annoyances with neoprene.

Still far from practical, but surprisingly far in the right direction, not just science fiction

 

[chrismar]

Interesting. The thermal insulation numbers I saw on flexible aerogels were about an order of magnitude better than neoprene. Mind you those were only flexible relative to normal aerogel.

It will be interesting to see if they can get a really flexible substance that doesn't compress at depth. I don't think it's possible, but hope to be proven wrong!

 

[efattah]

I had thought of making an aerogel wetsuit a couple of years ago when they first became available. However since the aerogels were not flexible the only obvious method was to crush/break the aerogel into tiny pieces, and instead of putting bubbles in the neoprene, put the crushed aerogel. However I never had time to actually try it. Nice to see someone is trying.

 

[Mullins]

They probably wouldn't need to be very flexible to be useful for making wetsuits. There are plenty of panels in a wetsuit that don't need to stretch or flex much. You could always use different materials for the stretchy bits.