127.0.0.1

Hi,

I am pretty well chuffed with the performance of aerogel insulators.

So I am looking at the Polar bottle in one hand, and my tube of Goop in the other,
and thinking....


what if I cut the bottom open, yanked out the foil insulation, dumped in
aerogel granules, sealed it back up. Would this be better than a stock polar
at keeping my carbs from icing ?



Well, stay tuned to find out. I have 990ml of aerogel granules coming my way and I am gonna
sacrifice one of my Polar bottles in an experiment.

FightingPanther

aerogel is sweet...

Just thinking for a minute, you would be much better off if you could fuse the granules into one insulating unit otherwise a composite of the normal polar insulation and the aerogel granules will probably yeild a better insulation. If you were to use just the aerogel granules there would still be air between the individual granules and air = bad.

Heres my ranking
1 Vacuum sealed aerogel bottle or aerogel cast in the needed shape
2 Composite polar insulation and aerogel filling the exterior air pockets
3 Aerogel granules no vacuum
4 Polar bottle

127.0.0.1

it has to remain squeezable. aerogel is a solid. must be very small particles.
the only other option would be a blanket material like pyrogel 2250 that toasty feet uses and
replace the polar liner with it.
I know that would work, but would require a new bottle design to get the thin blanket to fit in.

aerogel granules, I can crush down a little more and pour in the space in the polar and fill it all up.




1 Vacuum sealed aerogel bottle or aerogel cast in the needed shape

yeah that would be using the top insulator ever devised by humans.
very very expensive to obtain any sizeable piece of solid aerogel. crumbs are
a dime a dozen, so to speak, because they are useless to NASA

2 Composite polar insulation and aerogel filling the exterior air pockets

not sold on this vs aerogel. a mylar polar-like footbed vs aerogel, the aerogel is
a zillion times better by itself. I did think of leaving the polar liner in there and
trying to get aerogel in, but the liner is all wrinkly and I wouldn't be able to
get all the spaces filled easily. in manufacture, yes maybe better than aerogel alone

3 Aerogel granules no vacuum

this is what the nanogelite uses, and dang they work pretty well. I am not so happy
with the mouthpiece on the elite. it doesn't leak or anything, I just can't pull a sip
as easily as a perfectly round mouthpiece. the elite is oval so you can turn it and lock
it closed, but don't have to. (neat feature)

I was thinking of cannibalizing a nanogelite and dumping it's grains into a polar void, but
then i would probably end up with 2 useless bottles. I got united nuclear to send me a
boatload of aerogel granules.

4 Polar bottle

Hezz

As good as aerogel is as an insulator would it be better than a standard vacuum flask. Unless the container itself was made of aerogel I don't think that it could be an improvement over the standard vacuum flask. Somehow , I don't think that putting aerogel inside a standard insulated water bottle would be as good as a standard vacuum flask.

Still, it might be worth the effort to try it since it would be nice to have a squeezable water bottle with increased insulation properties.

What about a carbon fiber epoxy vacuum flask. Now that's a cool idea. It could be light and perform better than a steel vacuum flask.

127.0.0.1

squeezeable


if i wanted a vacuum bottle I would just get one.

andrelam

I use two bottles when I go to work (year round). One is a standard bottle, the other is a Polar insulated bottle. Both are filled with ice , then topped off with water. The un-insulated bottle wil have the inside of the bottle coated with ice on a chllly 12F morning. once Inplace it on my desk and let it sit a few minutes the cap will defrost and I have nice "ice water." The Polar bottle does not freeze in the main part of the body, but the cap also freezes (just like the standard bottle). That bottle stays nice and cold throughout the afternoon.

In either case if I expected to be able to drink if I were out for a long ride, both would have their caps frozen so no drink would come out. The big improvement in the Polar bottle is that it does prevent the reset of the bottle from freezing.

The insulation on the Polar bottle therefore is fine on the bottle, what realy needs to be worked on is to develop an insulated cap that prevents the top from freezing.

Happy riding... I like cold water... I can get plenty of that during my Winter commute
André

jwa

Any old water bottle, with enough alcohol added to the drink, won't freeze.

tmoritz

And nobody can tell if you are swerving because of the snow and ice or because you're drunk!

Add to that, since alcohol is a natural pain killer so when you do fall or get hit by a bus it won't hurt as much.

127.0.0.1

well...

Project -modify polarbottle- is on hold until I can build an environment to do the mod in


I have a huge container of aerogel granules now. and holy crap, this stuff is light. can't even
tell anything is in the container.

anyhow, the little aerogel granules are hard to see, and they readily creep along lines of
static charge and basically go all over the place, and are hard to clean up.

they aren't dangerous mostly. you don't wanna breath this stuff, and I bet in my eye it would
cause some scratching. it feels like small bits of hard foam.

anyhow, for me to fill the void in a polarbottle with these, i will need a more humid (or anti-static) environment. it is dry as a bone in winter here, so I can't do this...probably for a while.



but, I do have a giant container of aerogel now,
and you don't

harharhar....