yeah, since efficiency is usually a measure of how much energy is lost to heat, should be 0% vs 100%... but, marketing.

I also doubt they are using aerogel or cryostats insulation to surround hot bricks. (or maybe that's why 1 container costs $9M?)

Matt (and team) from Undecided almost never approach their videos with a critical eye. Many startups' claims can be debunked with high school physics, but they just present everything as-is and with good production value. I consider their channel more entertainment than education, but still interesting to see some of the ideas out there.

I just realized, while watching this, that cotton candy is an aerogel. The first aerogel, as a matter of fact, since it was first made some 300 years ago.

>> ^Longswd:

I would guess that this is actually a mass of Aerogel.


There's two problems with that idea:
1) Aerogel is extremely light but also quite solid. It wouldn't be changing shapes.
2) That would be like $200,000 worth of aerogel. If that's really what it was, someone would be frantically chasing after it.

I would guess that this is actually a mass of Aerogel.

Almost all energy consumed by households is avoidable waste:
* think about the way you fry eggs. 99% of the heat from the burner is going into the air, not into the eggs. This should be solved by using small device that is well insulated on all sides and has an internal heating coil.
* Ovens have a high heat capacity and shitty insulation. More energy is wasted on heating up the oven itself than actually goes into the food. This could be solved by lining the inside of the oven with silica aerogel instead of metal. If an oven is properly insulated it will not feel very warm to the touch on the outside, even after being on for an hour.
* Most of your heating and cooling energy leaks out the windows -- if their inside surface feels significantly above or below ambient during extreme weather, your heating and cooling energy is being wasted and hemorrhaging out the windows. It would literally save energy to have a webcam on the roof and display that image on an LCD inside instead of having windows, if you live in a climate with extreme temperatures (especially in cold climates, as the energy used for the LCD would contribute to heating the house). All ventilation needs can be accomplished through a small portal with a fan (and a heat exchanger, of course).
* Hot water is produced very wastefully by just dumping energy into it instead of using a thermodynamic cycle to transfer heat and produce something cold as a byproduct. Hot water could be co-produced with cold water for AC / Refrigeration much more efficiently than doing them all separately.
* Hot water goes down the drain. This should at least go through a heat exchanger, which would dramatically lessen the amount of work that has to be done to heat up new hot water. A 7 Liter per minute showerhead putting water 30 degrees F above ambient down the drain is wasting over 8135 watts as long as it is running. However, I don't know of any houses yet designed with a heat exchanger between the shower drain water and the intake of the water heater.
* Fluorescent lights. Duh. Incandescent bulbs should be banned.
* Freezers built with the door on the top will waste much less energy to the convection of air when opened, for obvious reasons.

Here ends the lifestyle-neutral list of suggestions. The following would involve sacrificing something:

* Reduce excessive lighting -- if people wouldn't fuck up their retinas by driving just after sunrise or just before sunset, or seeing specular reflections of the sun on shiny cars and buildings outdoors, they wouldn't need such bright lights indoors. A 1 watt LED is plenty for reading. Sunlight could be used in the daytime instead of artificial lights.

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Tags for this video have been changed from 'Seagel Aerogel' to 'Seagel, Aerogel, float, air, light, material, biodegradable' - edited by demon_ix

There's another video somewhere that shows them put a cube of Aerogel in a white hot furnace. He takes it out with a pair of tongs and then picks it up, still glowing bright red. It is such a good insulator and such a bad conductor of heat that it doesn't even feel warm.

It's too bad they don't make more of it so we could all play with it. It is expensive. I can't wait until the patent expires.

>> ^Dranzerk:
Watch it again, its 4000 THOUSAND times.

Oop. I "misremembered" that statistic. Still, even at 4000 times, I stand by the assertion.

Yogi's absolutely right, though. Science needs to kick it up a notch if it wants to hang with Ted.

>> ^Dranzerk:
>> ^ReverendTed:
The claim that it supports "400 times its weight in compressive load" doesn't really impress me all that much when the stuff is the "least dense substance ever created."
Still, looks awesome.


Watch it again, its 4000 THOUSAND times.


So is that like FOUR MILLION?!

>> ^ReverendTed:
The claim that it supports "400 times its weight in compressive load" doesn't really impress me all that much when the stuff is the "least dense substance ever created."
Still, looks awesome.



Watch it again, its 4000 THOUSAND times.

I found pricing between $75 and $120 per cubic centimetre. That may be why he has a slightly pained expression when he breaks a piece.

According to Cabot Corp, one of the manufacturers of aerogel, it is completely hydrophobic, so I would guess the deterrent from its use as a bath toy is cost...

Here's a 10-year-old who produced his own aerogels.

IIRC it dissolves in water, which is one of the reasons why it isn't currently wide spread, I imagine.

Think of all the cool bath toys you'd have otherwise.

Aerogel-ducky, you're the one...

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>> ^zombieater:
Yeah yeah, but is it biodegradable? Decades ago plastic was the "miracle material" and now it composes a great deal of our landfills, hardly any gets recycled, and we have plastic "dead zones" in the ocean because of over manufacturing.

Well, if the material is really Silicon Dioxide (SiO2, or Silica), then you use it every day already.

It's used in so many common items (glass, for example, is fused silica) that it's really not even remarkable anymore. Until new applications like this surface...