Building insulation with aerogels - sustainable and affordable | Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize 2023

We need to lower our CO2 emissions systematically if we want to achieve our climate targets. Insulating buildings is a key part of this. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT ‪@fraunhoferumsicht‬ in Oberhausen have been working in collaboration with PROCERAM GmbH & Co. KG to develop a sustainable, affordable mineral-based insulation material that is far more effective than options such as polystyrene. This material
can achieve the same level of insulation as polystyrene with only half the
layer thickness. Three members of the development team are being awarded the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize 2023 for this achievement.
Consisting of 99.8 percent air, aerogels are the lightest and most effective insulation materials in the world. And as they are made from the non-hazardous raw material silicon dioxide, they are also sustainable and can be manufactured without the use of petrochemicals. However, up until now, there has been a stumbling block: aerogels have
been much too expensive to use as insulation, as conventional aerogel production is costly and time-consuming. This means they have so far mostly been used for niche applications such as in space suits.
PROCERAM GmbH & Co. KG saw this challenge as an opportunity, and set itself the goal of mass-producing affordable aerogels. If they could create an affordable, noncombustible mineral insulation material that was a more effective insulator than alternative fossil-based materials, it would revolutionize the insulation sector. To this end, the entrepreneurs contacted experts at Fraunhofer UMSICHT - and together, they created
a new manufacturing process for producing aerogels within six years. Their system can be fully scaled up from the laboratory to pre-commercial production level without any environmentally hazardous chemicals. The new process also reduced the costs of manufacturing the previously expensive aerogels by 70 percent, and brought production time down from more than 10 hours to only 2.5.
Nils Mölders and Andreas Sengespeick of Fraunhofer UMSICHT and Christoph Dworatzyk of PROCERAM GmbH & Co. KG will be receiving the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize 2023 for their achievement.
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▬ Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
Since 1978, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has awarded annual prizes to its
employees for outstanding scientific achievements that solve practical problems.This year, three prizes, each worth 50,000 euros, are being awarded to research groups from different institutes.
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