{"id":16526,"date":"2024-12-23T07:01:56","date_gmt":"2024-12-23T01:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=16526"},"modified":"2025-04-04T20:01:37","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T14:31:37","slug":"aerogels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/aerogels\/","title":{"rendered":"What are Aerogels?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong>About Aerogel:\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Aerogels are among the <strong>lightest solid materials<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>They are created by <strong>combining a polymer<\/strong> with a <strong>solvent to form a gel<\/strong>, and then removing the liquid from the gel and replacing it with air.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Properties:<\/strong> They are extremely <strong>porous and very low in density and <\/strong>they offer advantages like adjustable surface chemistry<\/li>\n<li>They are also known <strong>as \u2018solid air\u2019<\/strong> or <strong>\u2018frozen smoke\u2019<\/strong> are excellent adsorbents (a solid substance used to remove contaminants) and are incredibly lightweight solids composed mostly of air.<\/li>\n<li>Aerogels are most preferred in <strong>environment and oil spill clean up,<\/strong> for insulation purposes<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Key facts about the newly developed Hybrid Aerogel<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Researchers have designed and synthesised aerogel: the sponge-like absorbents, light in weight and porous synthetic materials for this purpose.<\/li>\n<li>The aerogel\u2019s unique structural composition was <strong>treated with iron nitrate salts<\/strong> and maintained at room temperature for about two to five minutes.<\/li>\n<li>This specially designed aerogel was found to be <strong>effective in extracting<\/strong> and retrieving upto 99 per cent of <strong>gold ions from the e-waste.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>In daylight, the hybrid aerogel could extract 1689mg\/gram of e-waste and 2349mg \/ gram under blue light.<\/li>\n<li>As there were dual processes involved, that of adsorption and reduction \u2014 the quality of the recovered gold was <strong>reasonably pure<\/strong> thereby reducing the need for further purifying processes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1: What is Porosity?<\/h3>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>News: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/india\/iiser-pune-team-hybrid-aerogel-extract-gold-e-waste-9735922\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">IISER Pune team develops hybrid aerogel to extract gold from e-waste<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aerogel 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":16527,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}