Innovationspreis Niedersachsen 2023

This week Marc and Dirk participated in the finals of the Innovationspreis Niedersachsen 2023 as representatives of the aerogel-it team. The jury nominated aerogel-it for the category Vision with its 100% bio-based lignin aerogel for energy efficiency and decarbonization.

Nele Bracht and Hannes Putfarken and their colleagues of the Innovationsnetzwerk Niedersachsen excellently organized the event in the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover. The Minister of Economy, Traffic, Construction and Digital of Lower Saxony Olaf Lies, the Minister of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony Falko Mohrs, president of the Leuphana University Lüneburg Prof. Dr. Sascha Spoun and CEO of the Innovationszentrum Niedersachsen Dr. Thomas Schulmeyer gave speeches.

It was an excellent event with nine truly interesting contributions from industry and academia. It had been noticeably hard for the jury to select the winners. aerogel-it did not win the first prize. Nevertheless, the team felt honored to be among the selected few nominated companies and individuals!

Nicely, our adopted home city Osnabrück showed a strong presence with one nomination and one win: Congratulations to the team of Altosens GmbH who presented their innovative pressure sensing technology! The teams were happy to be supported on site by Thomas Serries of the WIGOS Wirtschaftsförderungsgesellschaft Osnabrücker Land mbH, Thomas Büdden of the ICO InnovationsCentrum Osnabrück and Ingmar Bojes of the WFO Wirtschaftsförderung Osnabrück GmbH.

After the award ceremony, the organizers rounded off the event with a reception in the museum patio for

celebration and networking.

20230918_HS_09871 sm.jpg

20230918_HS_09833 sm.jpg

Exclusive distribution of Beerenberg products

We are honored and very happy to share with you that as of September 2023 aerogel-it will exclusively distribute the following products of our Norwegian partner Beerenberg:

  • The silica aerogel blanket Oryza BGT for the Construction market for the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).

  • An EV battery aerogel heat shield solution for Europe.

We feel that the Oryza BGT aerogel blanket is a game-changer especially for two reasons:

  • It has the highest fire class A1 for maximum fire resistance in any application.

  • Its advanced dust-control technology makes the blankets very easy to handle and integrate (a whole different game compared to similar products).

It has been truly a pleasure to work with the Beerenberg colleagues and to set up this relationship. First volumes have already been sold, and we have set up a distribution hub in Germany.

Together with our partners Kahnt & Tietze we are in the process of getting the European Technical Assessment (ETA) for Oryza BGT so that our customers can use the material freely in their Construction projects.

We have also submitted first samples of the EV heat shield product for testing to European Automotive customers and are waiting for their feedback. The product has scored highly in Asia and European solutions are sorely needed.

More info on the partnership can be found in the Beerenberg press release.

Beerenberg enters distribution agreement with aerogel-it.

aerogel-it team meets IBIH CEO and TUHH president

This week the aerogel-it team had the pleasure and honor of meeting IBIH CEO Dr. Yunhong Wang and Prof. Dr. Andreas Timm-Giel, president of Hamburg University of Technology, together with our longstanding collaboration partner Prof. Dr. Irina Smirnova, head of the Institute of Thermal Separation Processes at TUHH, to discuss aerogel-it and IBIH aerogel products, developments and perspectives. Specifically the electrical vehicle (EV) market was a topic.

Dr. Wang is a key member of the global aerogel industry as well as a seasoned chemical engineering expert. He spent ~20 years of his life in Europe e.g. working for Lonza before founding IBIH in China around 5 years ago. Since then IBIH has strongly grown to become one of the largest aerogel suppliers in China as well as the largest supplier of aerogel heat shields for EVs with well-known, heavyweight customers such as CATL and BYD. Fun fact: The majority of EVs in China (which are a lot) drive with aerogel heat shields produced by IBIH!

The EV market is now seen as the largest future market for aerogels (see IDTechEx article here and market study here). However, it seems that the global aerogel industry is simply not growing fast enough to meet the enormous growth predicted for the EV industry, and it is expected that aerogels will still be required for a while in EV batteries despite developments such as solid-state or LFP chemistry. Energy densities and safety requirements will keep increasing, and space-saving aerogel heat shields have already demonstrated their safety performance in real life – there was not a single fire with the EVs containing IBIH aerogel heat shields.

But importantly, IBIH alone will not be able to cover this growing gap, and especially in Europe there is a serious lack of aerogel production capacities. IBIH is pushing for a collaboration of the global aerogel industry to address this growing need. aerogel-it and TUHH are joining forces with IBIH and others to meet this challenge.

Prof. Dr. A. Timm-Giel (TUHH president), Dr. Yunhong Wang (CEO of IBIH) and colleagues, Prof. Dr. I. Smirnova, aerogel-it team.

Digital optimization leads to energy savings

As aerogel-it we pursue and drive the decarbonization of multiple industries. Apart from the use of non-fossile raw materials for our products such as lignin, this includes energyefficiency across our whole value chain.

One important manufacturing step of aerogels is the so-called supercritical drying where supercritical CO2 at high pressure and temperature is used as extraction liquid to very mildly remove solvent from a gel precursor. In the supercritical state, CO2 looks and behaves similar to a liquid (check out the comments for more details if you are curious). Why is this necessary? Because using a conventional solvent and drying method would destroy the material and its fine pores – they would simply collapse due to huge capillary forces. Supercritical drying gives access to the super-fine pores of aerogels with less than 100 nm diameter (around 1000x less than a human hair!). These pores give aerogels their amazing performance.

Energy efficiency is important here: Getting CO2 to the supercritical state requires a lot of energy for compression and heating, which forms a large part of the total energy consumption of our process. The aerogel-it team has years of experience with industrial aerogel manufacturing and its challenges, and we have the clear goal to save energy wherever possible. We will establish the most energy-efficient aerogel manufacturing processes in our future plants!

An important milestone has now been reached: Our process expert Alberto recently completed a fully virtual thermodynamic simulator of this supercritical drying step which now enables us to run the process digitally. By optimizing the process with this digital twin, Alberto could reduce the energy consumption by more than 95%!

And it does not stop with the optimization at the planning stage. Once our production plant is running, the process control systems will feed into this digital twin to optimize manufacturing via machine learning in real-time!

Alberto working on the digital model for optimization of our aerogel production process.