Aerospace

A Demanding Service Environment

Aerospace applications perhaps represent the harshest and most critical service environment known to man.

Materials and components must perform repeatedly and reliably in a consistent and predictable manner over a broad range of temperature, pressure, mechanical and other environmental factors. Since the expected life of an aircraft or space vehicle can be in the range of 20-40 years, materials and components must be capable of providing this level of “you can count on it” performance through decades of intermittent to continuous service.

While the unexpected failure of materials and components in land-based applications is certainly not without consequences, such failures in the air or in space can be dire. When you’re driving in your car and something goes wrong, you can always pull over to the side of the road. There is no such convenience at 35,000 feet.

As such, materials and systems used in aerospace must provide an exacting and extreme level of performance time and time again for years and years.

Besides an unimpeachable level of durable performance, aerospace materials must be extremely cost, space and weight effective since these factors influence vehicle profile, capability and range.

Aerogel Advantages

Compared to other insulations used for aerospace applications, our thin flexible Pyrogel^® AR5220 and AR5400 series of insulations offer several substantial advantages over incumbent insulations:

Reliability
Our technology was first perfected for use by NASA in the mid to late 1990’s. It doesn’t get any more mission critical than this.

Thermal Efficiency
The thermal conductivity of Pyrogel^® ranges from two to six times less than incumbent materials. As such, you can typically do more with less. For more specific details on our thermal conductivity, please check the Product Data Sheets in our Literature Center.

Weight and Cost
Due to the high thermal capacity of our Pyrogel^® materials, incumbent levels of performance can be maintained while reducing insulation thickness by 50-600%, yielding significant reductions in cost and weight. Alternatively, incumbent levels of insulation thickness can be maintained, and performance improved by the same factor without adding weight or taking up more space.

Long Term Durability
Our Pyrogel^® blankets are made with a tough amorphous silica reinforced with proprietary high strength fibers.

Moisture Resistance
Our materials do not absorb moisture or water. As such, their long term performance does not degrade, and there are no issues with in service weight gain.

These advantages make Pyrogel^® extremely useful for a broad range of applications, particularly for high temperatures.

Our Pyrogel^® 5220 and 5400 Series of materials are currently in service on commercial, military and business and private aircraft.

Aerospace IR Suppression
Without Aerogel Insulation	With Aerogel Insulation

For more information on Pyrogel, please visit the Literature Center for the Product Data Sheet and MSDS.