This indispensable handbook provides comprehensive coverage of the current state-of-the-art in inorganic, organic, and composite aerogels – from synthesis and characterization to cutting-edge applications and their potential market impact. Built upon Springer’s successful Aerogels Handbook published in 2011, this handbook features extensive revisions and timely updates, reflecting the changes in this fast-growing field.
Aerogels are the lightest solids known to man. Up to 1000 times lighter than glass and with a density only four times that of air, they possess extraordinarily high thermal, electrical, and acoustic insulation properties, and boast numerous entries in Guinness World Records. Originally based on silica, R&D efforts have extended this class of materials to incorporate non-silicate inorganic oxides, natural and synthetic organic polymers, carbon, metal, and ceramic materials. Composite systems involving polymer-crosslinked aerogels and interpenetrating hybrid networks have been developed and exhibit remarkable mechanical strength and flexibility. Even more exotic aerogels based on clays, chalcogenides, phosphides, quantum dots, and biopolymers such as chitosan are opening new applications for the construction, transportation, energy, defense and healthcare industries. Applications in electronics, chemistry, mechanics, engineering, energy production and storage, sensors, medicine, nanotechnology, military and aerospace, oil and gas recovery, thermal insulation, and household uses are being developed.
Readers of this fully updated and expanded edition will find an exhaustive source for all aerogel materials known today, their fabrication, upscaling aspects, physical and chemical properties, and the most recent advances towards applications and commercial use. This key reference is essential reading for a combined audience of graduate students, academic researchers, and industry professionals.
Michel A. Aegerter is the retired Director of the Department of Coating Technology at the Leibniz-Institut für Neue Materialien (INM) in Saarbrücken with decades of research dedicated exclusively to the sol-gel process, the materials derived from it and their application. Since 2007, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sol-Gel Science and Technology (JSST).
Nicholas Leventis received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in organic chemistry in 1985. After retiring as a Professor of Chemistry from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, he recently joined Aspen Aerogels. His aerogel work has focused on polymer-crosslinked aerogels, organic aerogels from most main classes of organic polymers, interpenetrating organic-inorganic aerogels, as well as metallic, ceramic and carbon aerogels.
Matthias M. Koebel received his PhD from Brown University in 2004. After a postdoctoral stay at UC Berkeley with G.A. Somorjai focusing on nanocatalysis, he joined EMPA back in his home country – Switzerland – in 2006 where he began building a research group in soft chemistry and aerogels. His core activities are linked to process-scale up and lab-to-market transfer of nanomaterials science. In 2021 he founded siloxane AG.
Stephen A. Steiner III is the President, CEO, and founder of Aerogel Technologies, LLC, a leading aerogel manufacturer. Steiner holds a PhD in Materials Chemistry and Engineering from MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, an SM in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT, and a BS in Chemistry Course from the University of Wisconsin―Madison. He is an accomplished nanomaterials researcher, with expertise in aerogels, nanocarbons, and aerospace materials.
