We are very grateful that we could share our aerogel-it vision on lignin bioaerogels for decarbonization with the global aerogel community during the 2022 edition of the International Seminar On Aerogels at TUHH. A big thank you to the organizers for this chance!
It was an excellent conference with participants from all over the world. We enjoyed a fascinating talk by Stephanie Vivod from NASA on polyimide aerogels as tough materials for space applications! As usual, Aerogel Technologies gave amazing talks with beautiful slides – glad to see they are advancing with their scale-up activities. Lots of interesting contributions from the TUHH group of Irina Smirnova, the TU Dresden group of Alexander Eychmüller and the team of Barbara Milow at the DLR. Many interesting samples to see and, also important, to touch like the carbon aerogels for EV battery electrodes made by aerogel veteran Nick Leventis now working at Aspen Aerogels. And of course the beautiful silica aerogel art by Prof. J. Michalou(di)s which also made its way into jewelry like the Goutte de Ciel by Boucheron.
And above all it was really nice to see so many members of our aerogel family again in person after so many years (and to have beers with some of them)! We had good discussions on aerogel science during the days and over dinner, and while we are advancing our understanding it also became clear that there is still a lot about these materials at the boundary of liquid and solid we do not know – more research waiting to be done.
