An a.c. calorimetric study has been carried out on octylphenylthiolpentyloxybenzoate (8ÂS5) in three silica aerogels with mass densities r=0 0́8, 0 1́7 and 0 3́6 g cm Õ 3 . Results for the least porous aerogel (r=0 3́6) are completely consistent with those reported previously for 8CB in the same aerogel. Freezing of 8ÂS5 damaged the more porous r=0 0́8 and 0 1́7 aerogels by creating internal voids an...

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...

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...

We report that nanoparticulate zirconia (ZrO(2)) catalyzes both growth of single-wall and multiwall carbon nanotubes (CNTs) by thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and graphitization of solid amorphous carbon. We observe that silica-, silicon nitride-, and alumina-supported zirconia on silicon nucleates single- and multiwall carbon nanotubes upon exposure to hydrocarbons at moderate temperat...

There is a large promise for thermophones in high power sonar arrays, flexible loudspeakers and noise cancellation devices. The freestanding aerogel-like carbon nanotube sheet as a thermoacoustic (TA) heat source demonstrates so far the best performance. However, the limited accessibility of large size free standing carbon nanotube sheets and other even more exotic materials published recently,...