Determining the aerogel “players”: Using CI to validate the market potential of an emerging industrial process
✍ Scribed by Richard P. Fennelly
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Weight
- 200 KB
- Volume
- 9
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1058-0247
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Aerogel" is a highly porous material having the appearance of "frozen smoke." It consists of a thin mesh-like network of silica, the material constituting sand. The aerogel structure is permeated with an incredibly large number of air-filled pores. This material was first discovered in the 1930s, but has largely remained a laboratory curiosity since that time despite the discovery in the mid-1980s of a safe process for its production. There have been some very esoteric, high-tech uses for aerogel. Examples include: as the insulation material for the Martian Rover vehicle and as a sensor to detect chemical and bio-logical agents. However, aerogel technology is still largely perceived as not yet having found its way into commercial practice to any appreciable extent.
A client of mine holds important patents regarding the previously mentioned, important mid-1980s process development. These patents clearly could be of importance as a generator of licensing income should the aerogel technology area "take off." However, this client had not conducted any real investigation as to the market potential of aerogels, since its original line of research in the 1980s had been discarded as not being a needed "core"