Known as "frozen smoke", aerogel is a nanoporous material that shows great potential in various fields due to its extreme thermal insulation, light weight, high porosity and other advantages. However, the problem that aerogel powder is easy to agglomerate and difficult to disperse uniformly limits its large-scale and diversified applications. The emergence of aerogel slurry effectively solves this pain point. It uniformly disperses aerogel powder in a solvent through a special process to make a paste or slurry material, which not only completely retains the excellent properties of aerogel, but also has good constructability and compatibility, becoming a key bridge connecting aerogel laboratory research and industrial application.
The core advantage of aerogel slurry lies in the dual breakthrough of "retaining characteristics and improving performance". It inherits the high porosity of 80%—99.8% and ultra-low thermal conductivity of aerogel, and its thermal insulation performance is far superior to that of traditional slurry. At the same time, by adding dispersants, binders and other additives, it solves the industry problem of difficult dispersion of aerogel powder, and can be easily integrated with coatings, mortar, fibers and other substrates, adapting to various construction methods such as spraying, smearing and pouring. In addition, aerogel slurry is non-toxic, harmless, environmentally friendly and healthy, does not release harmful gases, conforms to the modern green development concept, and is suitable for many fields with high environmental protection requirements such as construction, environmental protection and new energy.
In terms of preparation process, the research and development of aerogel slurry relies on the upgrading of aerogel preparation technology. At present, the mainstream process is based on the sol-gel method. First, high-quality aerogel powder is prepared, then the powder is fully mixed with solvents and additives through ultrasonic dispersion, mechanical stirring and other methods, and then ground and refined to form a uniform and stable slurry system. With the maturity of atmospheric pressure drying and other technologies, the production cost of aerogel slurry has been greatly reduced, breaking the dilemma that early high-end nanomaterials were "too high-end to be popular", and promoting its gradual penetration from high-end fields such as aerospace to daily life scenarios.
Today, the application scenarios of aerogel slurry are constantly expanding: in the construction field, it can be made into thermal insulation coatings and thermal insulation mortar, applied to wall and pipeline insulation, greatly improving building energy efficiency; in the environmental protection field, its high adsorption performance can be used to treat heavy metals and oil pollution in sewage, helping pollution control; in the new energy field, it can be used as an additive for battery electrode materials to improve battery performance. In the future, with formula optimization and process innovation, aerogel slurry will further reduce costs, expand categories, unlock more application possibilities of nanomaterials, become an important force driving the upgrading of the material industry, and inject new momentum into the green and efficient development of various industries.