What are Aerogels?

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About Aerogel:

Aerogels are among the lightest solid materials.
They are created by combining a polymer with a solvent to form a gel, and then removing the liquid from the gel and replacing it with air.
Properties: They are extremely porous and very low in density and they offer advantages like adjustable surface chemistry
They are also known as ‘solid air’ or ‘frozen smoke’ are excellent adsorbents (a solid substance used to remove contaminants) and are incredibly lightweight solids composed mostly of air.
Aerogels are most preferred in environment and oil spill clean up, for insulation purposes

Key facts about the newly developed Hybrid Aerogel

Researchers have designed and synthesised aerogel: the sponge-like absorbents, light in weight and porous synthetic materials for this purpose.
The aerogel’s unique structural composition was treated with iron nitrate salts and maintained at room temperature for about two to five minutes.
This specially designed aerogel was found to be effective in extracting and retrieving upto 99 per cent of gold ions from the e-waste.
In daylight, the hybrid aerogel could extract 1689mg/gram of e-waste and 2349mg / gram under blue light.
As there were dual processes involved, that of adsorption and reduction — the quality of the recovered gold was reasonably pure thereby reducing the need for further purifying processes.

Q1: What is Porosity?

The porosity or void fraction is a measurement of the void or empty spaces of a material and is defined as the ratio between the volume of voids and the total volume.

News: IE