Making aerogel
32,910,018
Published 2020-03-30
It has taken many months, but I was finally able to make a decent aerogel!
Procedure resources: www.aerogel.org/ and bit.ly/g4gsf2s
Video References:
• Veritasium video: • World's Lightest Solid!
• Applied Science video: • Making silica aerogel at home
NileBlue pressure chamber video: • Going supercritical.
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Nile talks about lab safety: • Chemistry is dangerous.
Music in credits (Walker by SORRYSINES): soundcloud.com/sorrysines/walker
All Comments (21)
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i love how he casually just said that the best part is how it gets trapped in your eyelids and causes permanent blindness
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Aerogel: I’m 99% air Chip bags: pathetic
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I felt the joy with you when at the end the aerogel finally had no cracks! I watched the whole 40m and feel fresh after it, learned a lot and it was super entertaining! Thank you!
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NileRed: TMOS Subtitles: tea moss NileRed: *Shredding The Wax* Subtitles: [Music]
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"My favorite thing about it is that it reacts with water and turns back into silica, and it can do this in both your lungs and your eyes. The best part too, is that the particles form in the eyes under the surface, and they're way too small to remove so it can lead to permanent blindness." Oh yeah, that's what I love about it too
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you know you've have reached peak chemistry when you grate some candle as a mold base to make aerogel
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that frustrated "MMM" at 12:03 was priceless
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Can we just appreciate how labour intensive this is to make and how Nile actually came up with some great solutions even improving on the instructions he was following. Aerogel is like unobtainium, almost impossible to make. It's a material that literally can not exist without supercritial drying, yet here's a full video on Youtube showing exactly how it can be made. Amazing.
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''I came up with a very scientific method to figure this out... where I would occasionally just punch the table and see how it shook.''
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"I had never done anything like this before, but I had faith that I could do it." What a life motto.
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>Me reminiscing over his old video budgets after he just spent over $8,000 (mostly on pure gold) in his latest video (late December, 2023) about making purple gold. Our Red-Boi's come a long way over the years! Here's to more success and growth in 2024!
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Watching the liquid reach supercritical was super cool. The way the reflection from the bottom of the surface transitioned to refraction and then to transparent was awesome and ithe border between the two phases disappeared was awesome.
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The entire video "the instructions said to do this but instead, I did that"
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2:08 "the best part..." proceeds to talk about how silica can cause permanent blindness
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Just watched the Veritasium video on aerogel. He went to the Aerogel Technologies in Boston and when they showed the super critical drying process I noticed something that would have made your process much smoother. It appears they poured the gel into small molds and did not remove the gel from the mold until AFTER the super critical drying process was complete, doing so gave the smooth perfect appearance you were looking for.
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Even if you can't see the aerogel at 23:34's shooting, like Nile wanted, the scene still looks really pretty to me in an abstract way. Something about the lighting around the chamber walls and the liquid CO₂, and the straight-on perspective, is such a visually-appealing shot to me. I don't know.
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I wonder what living with him would be "Hey I just bought two little windows for 800 dollars"
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The noise he made when he dropped the gel, “U N H H H”
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I thought all you needed was a gel sack and a Ruby.
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“My favorite part about this chemical is that the fumes turn your eyes and lungs into literal quartz and cause permanent blindness” Thank you NileRed, very cool.
