If you are interested in the topic beyond this mission, you can find more interesting information here:
- Under the title “The New Super Insulator“, an article about the development of a new insulating material based on lignin has been published on the page https://www.klimareporter.de/gebaude/der-neue-super-daemmstoff. This insulating material was developed at TU Hamburg and scaled up to pilot plant level, meaning not only small laboratory quantities but already medium-sized quantities were produced. The startup company Aerogel-it from Osnabrück is now developing a completely bio-based solution that can be recycled or reused after use. (April 2023)
- Information on this can also be found under the title “Efficient House: Saving Energy with Super Insulator” at the German Federal Foundation for the Environment (DBU), which supports this startup.
- On the Baustoffwissen website, under the heading “From Research: Lignin Aerogels“, you can find more detailed information about the lignin aerogel developed at TU Hamburg (Dec. 2018).
- The company EvoTech Exterior GmbH in Austria sells high-performance insulating materials based on aerogels, which are, however, made from silicon dioxide, not biopolymers. On their pages, you can find the advantages of aerogels, currently available products, and a comparison of aerogels with meringue, which also gives a small idea of what aerogels are like: www.evotech.at/aerogel/
- The Aerogels and Aerogel Composite Materials department at the Institute for Materials Research of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has the largest research group on this topic in Germany. A comprehensive, generally understandable article on silica aerogels has been published in the DLR magazine: “Super Material Aerogel: Light as Air and Versatile” (July 2019), as well as several other contributions: “Aerogels – Bringing the All-Round Material into Applications” (Sep. 2019) and “Aerogel Packaging Can Replace Plastic” about biopolymer aerogels made from chitin and chitosan (Feb. 2021).
- Finally, an article in English: IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) ranks aerogels as one of the ten most important emerging technologies in chemistry in 2022, see “IUPAC Top Ten Emerging Technologies in Chemistry 2022“
- The idea for a new scientific study arose from the Kniffelix aerogel contribution: to consider apples, orange peels, mushrooms – and generally all living tissues – as naturally grown, porous hydrogels and to convert them directly into aerogels. Thus, 20 different food residues were converted into aerogels, which then exhibited aerogel-typical properties: in particular, they consisted almost entirely of air (high porosity) and showed high specific surface areas of up to approx. 450 m2/g. The fruit peel and vegetable aerogels produced are very interesting for applications, e.g., in the food industry. In summary, our idea not only led us to discover a simplified aerogel process but also to convert food waste or by-products into high-performance aerogels. The (English) technical article can be found here:
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2025/GC/D4GC05703A