N. Mulders Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware, 223 Sharp Laboratory, Newark, Delaware 19716 (Received 21 December 1998) Liquid 3He in 98%-porous aerogel simultaneously possesses properties of a disordered p-wave superfluid and an elastic solid. We have observed two sound modes of superfluid 3He in aerogel. The first (fast) sound is a compression wave, and the second (sl...

We demonstrate that superhydrophobic and superoleophobic nanocellulose aerogels, consisting of fibrillar networks and aggregates with structures at different length scales, support considerable load on a water surface and also on oils as inspired by floatation of insects on water due to their superhydrophobic legs. The aerogel is capable of supporting a weight nearly 3 orders of magnitude large...

A torsional oscillator has been used to study the flow of liquid 4He through silica aerogel. The tortuosity and dissipation of the flow in the fractal aerogel environment has been measured, for both capillary condensed films and a fully saturated cell. The scaling of tortuosity as a function of filling fraction has been investigated. We compare the results of our 88%-porous aerogel to a 92%-por...

The performance of synergetic hybrid aerogel materials of vanadia and graphene as electrode materials in supercapacitors was evaluated. The hybrid materials were synthesized by two methods. In Method I, premade graphene oxide (GO) hydrogel was first chemically reduced by L-ascorbic acid and then soaked in vanadium triisopropoxide solution to obtain V2O5 gel in the pores of the reduced graphene ...

Introduction: Dust from comet Wild 2 was collected at a velocity of 6.1 km/s by the Stardust spacecraft using low-density silica aerogel [1]. During deceleration, dust particles fragmented, mixed with aerogel, and were thermally modified, often melted. In order to disentangle the properties of impacting cometary particles from those caused by the capture process, Wild 2 material from various lo...

Buildings consume too much energy. For example, 16.6% of all the energy used in the United States goes towards just the heating and cooling of buildings. Many governments, organizations, and companies are setting very ambitious goals to reduce their energy use over the next few years. Because the time periods for these goals are much less than the average lifetime of a building, existing buildi...

We report the existence of two new topologically ordered glass phases of smectics in strained aerogel. In contrast to the case of unstrained aerogel, we find compelling theoretical arguments that a smectic in uniaxially stretched aerogel exhibits, for homeotropic nematic–aerogel alignment, a ‘smectic Bragg glass’ in the universality class of the ‘XY Bragg glass’. On the other hand, a uniaxial c...

The thermal and acoustic properties of innovative insulating systems used as building coatings were investigated: Granular silica aerogel was mixed with natural plaster in different percentages. This coating solution is transpiring and insulating, thanks to the use of a natural lime coat and aerogel, a highly porous light material with very low thermal conductivity. The thermal conductivity of ...

Introduction: The NASA Stardust mission is expected to collect in low-density, silica aerogel more than 1,000 dust particles >10 μm in size from the dust coma surrounding Comet Wild-2. It is planned that Stardust will return these samples to Earth early in 2006. Removal of each particle from the aerogel increases the possibility of contamination or loss, thus we are developing a facility to per...

The Stardust Mission used silica aerogel as the hypervelocity particle capture and return material since silica aerogel was the most reproducible to manufacture and the most thoroughly evaluated type of aerogel at the time [1]. However, the Stardust Science Team recognized that the use of silica aerogel, while expedient, introduced limits to mission’s eventual science return. This is due to the...