Archive for category: News

The aerogel-it team is honored and proud to have contributed to the new edition of the Springer Handbook of Aerogels, an important reference work in the aerogel field. It has been more than ten years since the previous edition (2011). The world of aerogels has certainly evolved a lot since then.

From the aerogel-it side, Marc, Dirk, Raman, Pavel and Alberto contributed. At they time they were still working for BASF and Hamburg University of Technology.

And Marc and Dirk were not alone from the industrial side – they were joined in their writing efforts by their former colleagues Dr. Sohajl Movahhed and Dr. Wibke Lölsberg – the four chemists were located at BASF Polyurethanes in Lemförde.

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.

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!

Tolle Neuigkeiten! aerogel-it ist für das Finale des Innovationspreises Niedersachsen 2023 nominiert !

Das Team ist sehr stolz über diese Anerkennung unserer Arbeit im Bereich biobasierter Aerogele wie z.B. unser 100% biobasiertes Ligninaerogel als Hochleistungswärmedämmung für Dekarbonisierung und Energieeffizienz in verschiedensten Industrien und Anwendungen.

Wir glauben fest daran, dass Aerogele und insbesondere Bioaerogele als hochinnovative Materialien einen wichtigen Beitrag leisten können und müssen.

Marc und Dirk freuen sich auf die Preisverleihung in Hannover am 18.09.23.

In June the aerogel-it team came together in Hamburg to celebrate 2 years since the founding of the company in 2021. Due to different working locations and full schedules it has not been easy to organize physical meetings involving everyone – and the team enjoyed the get-together a lot!

A good opportunity to recap since a lot has been achieved by the team and our partners over that time:

1. We continue to feel that aerogels will play in important role in the future. The megatrends such energy efficiency and decarbonization/ defossilization we saw back in 2021 are steadily moving the markets in our direction.

2. We are actively working on all verticals foreseen in 2021 with our global partner network. We have established the required market access. We are on an excellent path towards becoming a leading aerogel manufacturer and solutions provider.

3. Market feedback on our aerogel products, especially the 100% bio-based lignin aerogel has been overwhelming from all angles – the press, potential customers and potential partners. It shows us that we are on the right track with our aerogel solutions for decarbonization and energyefficiency.

4. We signed multiple MoUs and first supply agreements with our customers and partners and more are in preparation. Unfortunately we have not been able to communicate all of them but that will change. Our world-class legal team is doing an excellent job that we are very thankful for.

5. Sales are picking up and help us to finance our activities. In parallel, attracting investment for our first plant has not been easy. But it has been an exciting learning curve and we are glad that we did not commit too early. We can pursue our strategy unimpeded while going for the best matches.

6. We are super happy about receiving first funding from the DBU (Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt) for our green aerogel work. More public funding is upcoming 2024+.

7. After 1500+ hours of work between us and our partners, the basic engineering of our first multi-purpose aerogel production plant is almost complete. We created a robust concept based on next-generation technology and digital optimization. We are already working on further step-change technology for follow-up plants to make aerogels even more affordable.

8. The collaboration with Prof. Irina Smirnova and her Hamburg University of Technology group has been great (as in the previous 10+ years). Important R&D results have been achieved. The new pilot plant is close to commissioning. New exciting aerogel product lines that we could not have imagined before are coming into existence. Multiple patent applications were filed and more are in preparation.

9. Local business support in our area such as from WIGOS (Wirtschaftsförderungsgesellschaft Osnabrücker Land mbH) and the ICO (InnovationsCentrum Osnabrück) has been stellar.

Thank you very much to Marc, Dirk, Alberto, Raman, Pavel, Dr. Wulf, Marcus and to all our partners!