Archive for year: 2025

Last week, Eduard, Marc and Dirk presented aerogel-it at the Heinze Klimafestival 2025, a fair for sustainable construction in Berlin.

It has been the third time for the aerogel-it team to attend this fair. As in the previous years, the fair was truly excellent with lots of interesting exhibits and visitors. Bio-based products such as plant-based panels as well as recycling were highly visible topics.

And it was far from boring or quiet – Marc and colleagues were overwhelmed by the strong interest and many discussions on aerogel materials. For two days, the team was in conversations practically continuously – a good indicator for a successful fair!

aerogel-it could present a wide range of aerogel products for new construction and energetic renovation – aerogel granules, blankets, coatings and boards. Energetic renovation was by far the more dominant topic over new construction.

Plus, we were particularly proud to present the first cellulose aerogel directly prepared from straw! We are expecting lots of advantages for our aerogel platform technology from this backwards integration approach.

This work is part of a public funded R&D project, where we investigate the development and application of biomass-based aerogels together with our partners Kahnt & Tietze GmbH, va-Q-tec Thermal Solutions GmbH und Hamburg University of Technology. The project is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. We are seeing lots of exciting results already and are eager to share them with you a bit further down the line – stay tuned!

In April 2025, the aerogel-it team started the public funded project AEROLIGNOCEL together with our partners Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), Kahnt & Tietze GmbH and va-Q-tec Thermal Solutions GmbH. AEROLIGNOCEL is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

Last week the partners came together TUHH to discuss results and further directions we want to explore. TUHH were great hosts of an excellent and productive meeting – thank you! 🙏

Project Background

The aerogel-it team sees great opportunities for bioaerogel materials such as our cellulose bioaerogel. However, we currently rely on commercially available raw materials which in some cases have undergone unnecessary processing and do not match our requirements well. This causes increased cost and environmental burdens. As alternative, there are lots of interesting side streams that are relevant e.g. from agriculture or the food industry, with biorefineries as important cornerstone.

What will be worked on

aerogel-it and TUHH will investigate various bio-based raw material sources and side streams. From these, we will develop new aerogel materials for Construction and vacuum-insulation applications e.g. in thermally-controlled logistics. Kahnt & Tietze and va-Q-tec will integrate and test these new aerogel materials at lab and pilot scale. An important aspect is scalability of the new aerogel materials to get to commercially relevant solutions.

The benefits

We expect new new aerogel material classes and technical solutions, improved sustainability footprints and lower cost. Furthermore, we expect to identify new raw material sources including side streams. Finally, there will be important learnings on scaling up of these bioaerogel materials and on how they are integrated best into the applications.

The project will run until March 2028. Stay tuned!

Marc Fricke, Alberto Bueno Morales, Eduard SIEMENS, Alexander Kahnt, Nicola Brzoska-Steinhaus, Baldur Schroeter, Irina Smirnova, Michel Groth

Last week, the aerogel-it team came together in Hamburg to celebrate the company anniversary – already 4 years!

In addition to an excellent dinner at Küchenfreunde, Nikias Thörner of BYNIK organized a photoshooting with SOS and YAROSLAVA for us. It was high time to update those team photos, since we have gotten noticeably older since the last time those photos were taken.

It was very nice to have everyone together again, especially since it is not easy to get everyone together in one place what with all of the locations and commitments.

It was also a great opportunity for the team to take a moment and reflect on the great progress we have made in the last year.

Highlights of the last year

1️⃣ We are growing our aerogel distribution business. In general, are perceiving more interest from the market. And we are building new partnerships worldwide e.g. in the US, Middle East, SE Asia/Australia and China.

2️⃣ Completely new verticals and applications for aerogels have come up which we are now exploring. Thanks to our expertise and flexible aerogel material platform, we can quickly work towards new solutions.

3️⃣ Alberto, our “process magician”, has comissioned our pilot plant at Hamburg University of Technology. We have been able to produce hundreds of liters of our new aerogel materials. With this, we are validating both our next-generation product and process technology.

4️⃣ What is great: Our customers like our products and have purchased most of our pilot production. They have transitioned into their own pilot testing with success and are providing highly valuable learnings. The remaining pilot material has gone into various publicly funded projects such as the iclimabuilt project BIOVIPWALL.

5️⃣ Our biomineral silica aerogel is proving itself as next-generation version of classical silica aerogel with much-improved properties. It is suitable e.g. for aerogel render, aerogel coatings or aerogel cavity fill. But since it is robust, it also enables completely new aerogel-granule composites.

6️⃣ Our cellulose bioaerogel is showing great potential as bio-based and lightweight core material for vacuum-insulation panels e.g. for logistics solutions. We presented bioaerogel VIP prototypes at the BAU 2025 fair in Munich together with our partner va-Q-tec.

7️⃣ We have now filled a beautiful public project pipeline to work on exciting R&D topics over the next years with our partners. More details to follow.

8️⃣ We have condensed all of our technical and business learnings into an attractive investment offering. We will kick off scaling to production scale once all the pieces are securely in place.

aerogel-it celebrates 4 years! Thank you very much to the team and to all our partners and supporters! 🙏

Last week Marc and Dirk of the aerogel-it team had the pleasure to visit leading Chinese aerogel and thermal barrier manufacturer IBIH Advanced Materials. IBIH celebrated their their 10th anniversary and hosted the official opening of a brand-new joint international aerogel R&D center.

Also present were Hamburg University of Technology president Prof. Dr. Andreas Timm-Giel and vice-president Prof. Dr. Irina Smirnova. Both were visiting China to build new collaborations. They were joined by fellow aerogel compatriots Keey Aerogel with Francisco RUIZ, new CEO Stéphane Reyniers and his predecessor Michael O’Connor.

The IBIH story

Starting from zero, the IBIH team around CEO Dr. Yunhong Wang has established itself as the leading provider of aerogel thermal barriers for EV batteries. Through hard work and grit, they have become market leader in China. Founder and chairman Mr. Tian emotionally spoke about how hard the journey had been – which resonated with the aerogel-it and Keey Aerogel teams.

In addition to the very touching anniversary celebration, the colleagues of IBIH very kindly and proudly gave their guests tours of their various R&D and production facilities. A pleasure for the assembled aerogel experts who were impressed by the capabilities. Furthermore, aerogel-it and IBIH identified potential collaborations. And in addition to the many business-related events, the IBIH organizing team around Haibing Dong, Yitian Du杜倚天 and Meng Xiao hosted the visitors for an amazing week in Beijing and surroundings!

Thermal barriers and aerogels

Thermal barriers are – as of now – necessary to contain possible thermal runaway from EV battery cells. In this way, they prevent chain reactions across the battery and help to protect passengers of electrical vehicles. Aerogel has been found to provide an excellent solution for two reasons:

1️⃣ Due to its excellent thermal insulation performance, the material shields against thermal runaway even if very thin which saves space and increases vehicle range.

2️⃣  The aerogel structure can deal with battery cell “breathing” and expansion over the battery lifetime.

There was some hope for solid-state batteries to get rid of the runaway problem and with it the thermal barriers. But the involved high energy densities still bear risk. Therefore, aerogels may be here to stay.

Heat shields have already become the largest aerogel application. The aerogel market is now heavily contested between older players such as Aspen Aerogels and Cabot and younger players, especially in Asia and China. Interestingly, there is currently no aerogel production in Europe (something that aerogel-it and Keey are driving to change with our step-change and cost-saving technologies).

Already around 5 million electrical cars drive with 200 million aerogel thermal barriers produced by IBIH. Now they are expanding globally and hired a stellar set of people to do it. Quite a success story that we can only congratulate them on!

After his recent success with the bioaerogel, Alberto also single-handedly produced ~1000 liters of our next-generation silica aerogel at pilot scale on our plant at TUHH. This is a another major milestone for us.

We have concentrated all of our 15-20 years of aerogel experience and chemical expertise into the design of this material. Our next-generation silica aerogel is a hybrid material made of silica and biopolymers. We like to call it “biomineral” or “LSMA” – for now. There will be some re-branding in the future as we refine the material for various applications. Whatever its name – our customers and partners already really like it.

We see a number of important advantages:

1. If you have worked with current silica aerogels, you will know how dusty and brittle they are. This has always been a big problem for the applicators and integrators. We have tackled this: Our biomineral silica aerogel is not dusty, and it is mechanically stable. This makes it much easier to handle and work with.

2. Due to the improved mechanics, completely new types of aerogel composites can made out of our biomineral silica aerogel. This was difficult to impossible with current silica aerogels! Check out the photo.

3. Recycling and re-use become much more feasible, since the biomineral silica aerogel does not break down into dust quickly.

4. High cost is a problem of current aerogel materials and limits their acceptance. With our raw material choice together with our proprietary manufacturing process, we push for lower cost of aerogel materials. This is one of our core missions.

5. Current silica aerogels suffer from high CO2 footprints. Due to raw material choice and our proprietary manufacturing process, we expect a strongly reduced CO2 footprint for our biomineral silica aerogel. This will be especially important in the Construction industry with its ever stricter GWP targets. But of course improved sustainability is great in any application.

6. We can produce it with the same proprietary manufacturing process as our other aerogel materials – such as our bioaerogels. Multi-purpose production has been validated.

We are now going through the piloting phase and move towards showcases with our partners and customers. Really exciting times for the team!