Hi all,

After reading an article about the amazing material AeroGel and it's insulative properties I thought "I wonder if an aerogel jacket would be lighter than down for the same warmth?". I did a google search and found a company that makes a jacket with AeroGel but it doesn't have a lot of information.. here are the links:

http://www.gzespace.com/AbsoluteZ.html
http://www.gzespace.com/sales.html

AeroGel is the insulation used by NASA when they insulate uhh "space ships" :)

Apparently it's pretty expensive so a jacket worth it's "weight" might be a fortune but we ultralighters are known for sacrificing a lot of money to shave a few ounces ;)

Has anyone here heard of AeroGel used in any other garments?

Cheers,
Chris

I posted a number of links a while back. Take a look. I'm not exactly sure why there seems to be so little interest in the forums, but that could be because it is so expensive. Still, that never stopped anyone from using other aerospace technology for ultralight gear...

An Aerogel jacket of equivalent warmth will not be lighter than a high quality down jacket. Although the thermal conductivity of the best available Aerogel fabric (Spaceloft 6250) has .5x the thermal conductivity of the best down (twice as efficient for a given thickness), the density is 56x the best down. The Spaceloft density is high because in order to make the Aerogel resilient they inserted the crystals in the lattice of a woven fabric.

As an example, the Nunatak SkakaPlus in size medium provides a garment clo value of approximately 13.8 for a total weight of 9.6 oz and a fill weight of 5 oz. The same size jacket would need four layers of Spaceloft 6250 (.24") to provide the equivalent warmth. The loft of the Aerogel jacket would be half that of the down jacket for the same warmth but the fill weight would be approximately 26.67x more.

Edited by richard295 on 09/28/2006 14:25:13 MDT.