this is the ultimate test of aerogel

I put myself on the line to see who wins in the Battle of flamethrower versus aerogel

so if you really want to see the insulating properties of air gel you got to put it to the test and this material here is like the most insulating right

what is this yeah so this is pyro gel xte it's made by Aspen aerogel so it's one centimeter thick

it doesn't look like the blue stuff because it's actually a fiberglass blanket that's infused with aerogel

by the blue stuff he means this silica aerogel it's made of the same material as sand or glass but if you zoom into the nanoscale you'd see it has a sponge-like structure with tiny pores just tens of nanometers across

now aerogel can be up to 99.8% air but it's a better thermal insulator than air because those pores are so tiny that hot air struggles to diffuse through them

plus the nanoscale structure itself is a poor conductor of heat

but aerogel is pretty fragile in this form and so it's not really practical for most uses

instead what you can do is actually take tiny particles of aerogel and embed them in a composite material like blankets

but it has the additional component iron oxide just basically rust that makes it opaque to infrared radiation so it's good at stifling conduction convection and radiation

and on the other side of this insulating aerogel blanket we have Ben who he's from Cape Cod and responded to a tweet of mine when I asked if anyone in this area has a flamethrower or a not a flamethrower in this case from the boring company

have you ever fired this before I have not so this will be at first okay

so what we're gonna do is try to test what the temperature is on the far side of that blanket when we put the flamethrower at full bore on to this side all right are you ready I'm ready all right let's give this a try

right here I have the FLIR thermal camera this is the T 1020 which can record up to 2,000 degrees Celsius

first for comparison let's see what this flamethrower can do to something that's not aerogel

let's put it to the test on this super-sized she's kiss there you go all right Ben

within seconds the temperature of the chocolate is up to hundreds of degrees Celsius

around 30 seconds the whole thing starts to collapse

even after the flamethrower is removed parts of the chocolate are still well over 600 degrees Celsius

I think this is what the internet likes they like really hot things applied to you know novelty objects

okay now is the time to really put aerogel to the test

he's about to put the flame for our full bore on this side of the blanket just one centimeter away will be my hand on the backside of the blanket

one heart come in not I don't feel any Heat that is crazy

propane burns at about 2,000 Celsius so this point I barely feel anything that is incredible

they look like from the back feels like feels warm what about the other side how hots the other side

so this flame door was producing over 660 degrees Celsius on this side meanwhile on the other side we were just measuring about 50 degrees Celsius

we're going up to the highest range that this camera can do up to 2000 degrees Celsius

okay I know we're not gonna be able to see much except for the really hot stuff let's go for it

that is just insane but this blanket is still not hot

you see that with the thermal how hot is it 50 degrees see on the thermal I got 900 at one point yeah and it's actually still it's over 200 degrees Celsius

right now whoa yeah right there and I can still touch it

yeah can you see my handprints after I touched it Wow

now you might be wondering how it's possible to touch something hotter than 100 degrees Celsius without getting burned

well for that we need to go to another demonstration

this is a hot plate set to around 150 degrees Celsius and on top of it is a metal plate that is mostly covered in about a millimeter of an air gel coating called air lawn but a small square in the corner is left uncovered

this says about 120 627 degrees Celsius so clearly hotter than boiling water

so would you put your hand in boiling water I don't think so that would hurt

but what about putting it on this coating so let me try

how's it feel not like 130 degrees

it feels hot but yeah but it doesn't feel like 130 degrees

I wonder to prove the point there's some water in a little beaker when I move that oh yeah your figure yeah totally your hand prints thermal handprints left behind so I was cooling down the surface cooling it down

over here this is not coated and this is I think slightly hotter it's about it's Wow 180 degrees Celsius

so that is the part I don't want to touch yeah I definitely don't want to touch it because it doesn't have Erica on it

this is such a thin coating it's about a millimeter but even that millimeter of aerogel means that you can touch something that otherwise you would be totally unable to touch this would definitely burn you

and that's why there's a little beaker of water with a dropper is there you go I moved it

okay so take some of that and just to prove the point put it on the metal square

let me put some of this on that piece of metal here I'm gonna drop a little bit of water on it so we can see this really cools

the drops that splattered off onto the aerilon coating are not boiling

let's have a look here and this water doesn't doesn't boil right there

I don't know if this is gonna be like he trip he transferred through the water it gets hot

put your finger on the air a lot itself without the water right like there yeah no big deal right

yeah I mean that's not it's not uncomfortable it's clearly hot but it's but it's not like you know putting your hand in boiling water which is kind of crazy because it is hotter than boiling water but it just doesn't conduct the energy to your hand that fast that's really weird

they use this for applications which they call safe touch

so that's something that would normally instantly burn you something hot enough to boil water you could hold your hand on four minutes and it wouldn't at all

okay so far in this video I focused on using air gel in hot applications but it works equally well at the other end of the temperature spectrum at cryogenic temperatures

and this comes in handy for things like liquefied natural gas plants or by NASA when they're using liquid helium you need really good insulation to keep the heat out

I mean those cold pipes if they're not insulated properly can end up with huge ice falls on them which not only is inefficient it's also incredibly dangerous

so this is one of the major applications for aerogel these days

if you take a piece of cryo gel and dip it in liquid nitrogen for a good while it is still flexible when you bring it out

and that's kind of essential when you're working with material that needs to function at ultra cold temperatures

here is a carbon aerogel that has been submerged in liquid nitrogen and as that liquid nitrogen turns back into the gas state it functions like its own air hockey puck except instead of the air coming from the table it comes from the puck itself

you can even buy ski jackets these days that have special aerogel lined pockets that stay significantly warmer than standard jacket pockets and they're specially made for your cell phone so that it doesn't freeze up in the cold weather

you know I feel like this is a story of something that started as an oddity as something that didn't really have applications but clearly is a anime insulation and can be made into a really strong fire retardant material

why would they insulate subsea oil pipelines with this material that's a really interesting question

so this was what we would call the killer app for aerogel

the oil that comes out of wells in the deep ocean is very viscous and slaggy and so if you just had a pipe with that oil it would basically gum up

and so what you have to do is put another pipe around it and fill that gap with insulation it's called a pipe and pipe configuration

and so they heat the oil they have to keep it flowing but you need to insulate that so that it doesn't lose all of its heat to the cold temperatures of the surrounding ocean

so if you think about laying pipes like that from a ship you have these long segments of pipe that the ship has to basically pick it off put over the side of the boat and drop down the ocean

so you know at some point the pipe becomes so big and so heavy and capsized the boat

so they're really only three vessels on the planet that we're big enough to lay that really large diameter pipe for subsoil pipelines

Aspen aerogels came along and said hey guys we've got this really great new insulation it's three times better than polyurethane

so I can take this much polyurethane foam and shrink it into an insulation that's that much aerogel

now what it did was allowed you to shrink the outer diameter pipe of this pipe and pipe configuration substantially

and because of that mass reduction from the smaller diameter pipe all of a sudden 250 ships around the world Callay that smaller diameter pipe without any loss of performance in the oil pipeline

and so that resulted in alleviating years back logs of these pipe lines that need to get laid and save billions of billion stars

now when we filmed this video I knew the title would probably be something like flamethrower versus aerogel but I didn't think of it like a real battle like what would it mean for the aerogel to win that it just you know didn't get hot or something

but as it turns out in the flamethrower user manual it instructs you only to ever pull the trigger for seven seconds at a time maximum

but to get the shot and to get the blanket hot enough I frequently told Ben to pull the trigger for 5 or 10 times that long

that's like that was like triple okay

and what we noticed over the course of the shoot was that the flamethrower was working less and less well and we thought it was out of fuel but it just turned out something inside it was breaking and by the end we couldn't even pull the trigger

so I'm sorry Ben and in the battle of flamethrower versus air gel I think air gel definitely won you