Hydrophobic silica aerogel production at KEK

Abstract

We present herein a characterization of a standard method used at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) to produce hydrophobic silica aerogels and expand this method to obtain a wide range of refractive index (n = 1.006-1.14). We describe in detail the entire production process and explain the methods used to measure the characteristic parameters of aerogels, namely the refractive index, transmittance, and density. We use a small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) technique to relate the transparency to the fine structure of aerogels.

To be published in Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A, 9 pages, 10 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (2)

• Development of transparent silica aerogel over a wide range of densities
• Tanpopo cosmic dust collector: Silica aerogel production and bacterial DNA contamination analysis

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