What are Aerogels?

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: IISER Pune team develops hybrid aerogel to extract gold from e-waste