Archive for category: News

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!