Westwood Aerogel: powering high-performance thermal management materials
Aerogels—extremely insulative, lightweight, and thin material—have been around for almost 100 years, in applications ranging from aerospace to renewable energy to energy storage. High costs and a slow pace of innovation has hampered their wider adoption, but Westwood Aerogel has developed a more efficient production process in order to meet the needs of the global insulation market.
Founded in 2023 by Patricia McNeil and Daniel Farzannekou, Westwood is developing ZeroTherm™, a product that uses cutting-edge manufacturing technologies to reduce costs while maintaining the lightweight and insulative properties of aerospace-grade aerogel. We sat down with them to discuss ZeroTherm’s broad applications, climate impact, and how they got so excited about insulation in the first place!
Not many people are familiar with aerogels and their wide applications. How rampant are these materials today, and how/why is the thermal management material market growing?
The more energy we use—whether in transportation, computing, communications, or space exploration—the more heat we generate. That heat tends to reduce efficiency and increase costs, either through operation or manufacturing. Batteries and microchips are two major technologies that are susceptible to extreme temperatures in their production and use. Aerogels can enable all of these new technologies by mitigating thermal issues.
We’re focused on the EV battery market because that’s where we’re seeing a lot of growth and demand. As batteries get more energy-dense to meet consumer demand for longer range vehicles, it becomes more challenging to control where heat is going and prevent the batteries from overheating—including while passengers are still in the vehicle. That’s a major safety concern if you can’t manage where the heat is going. Aerogels are a perfect solution for this problem because they’re thin and light, and allow you to pack a lot of batteries in a small area while also being extremely insulating to prevent heat from moving to unsafe places in the vehicle.
Aerogels have been out of reach for so many applications that could benefit from them because manufacturing has been so challenging. From a strategic perspective, that’s what Westwood Aerogel is trying to solve. We want to introduce aerogel as the leading thermal solution for industries and technologies in and around construction, electrification, AI, space, and climate. A lot of our competitors are doubling down on legacy manufacturing processes because they like the padded margins and artificial scarcity of aerogel. We see the value that aerogels can provide society if they’re produced responsibly and at the scale that we’re planning.
What have been the historical barriers to making aerogels affordably? Outside of cost, in what other areas are you innovating?
Aerogels are ultralight sponges made of glass with nanopores thinner than a human hair. This nanoporosity scatters the heat throughout the aerogel’s three-dimensional structure, which is what makes aerogel such a fantastic insulator. The challenge of aerogel manufacturing is taking liquid precursors, casting them to form this nanoporous structure, and drying it without causing the nanopores to collapse.
To dry the aerogels, our competitors use a high-pressure, high-heat process that requires expensive, specialized vessels and consumes a lot of energy. They can also only process small batches at a time, limiting production output and driving up costs. We’ve developed a method that allows us to dry aerogel at ambient temperature and pressure, which means we can eliminate specialized equipment, reduce energy consumption, and increase manufacturing throughput. The result is a high-quality aerogel product that is affordable for customers in sectors previously closed off to aerogels.
We’re also developing new aerogel-based products that are suited for different markets by mixing aerogels with different materials. For example, ZeroTherm™, which is being developed for EV battery insulation, uses a blend of aerogel and flexible materials to expand and shrink with batteries as they charge and discharge. As we increase capacity and costs go down, we also plan to build mass-market materials for the construction industry. We’ve been working with a number of companies to develop aerogels both for in-wall insulation and exterior coatings to improve building envelope integrity.
How did the two of you become so passionate about aerogels?
Patricia: During grad school when I was researching aerogel for window insulation, no one expected my part in the aerogel project to go far; it was the underdog plan relative to our grant proposal. It was considered my starter project, then morphed into my zombie project, the thing which wouldn’t end because it kept bringing follow on funding. By the time I was ready to graduate, I found myself in a position where I was on the cutting edge of aerogel manufacturing, and there was a choice between shelving my expertise (and making a lot of money in industry) or following through with technology I had built my academic career around. I truly believe that aerogels should be ubiquitous as an insulation material, and I’ve made it my mission to make that happen.
Daniel: Coming from a non-technical background, the only exposure I had to aerogels before meeting Patricia was from YouTube and a video my fourth grade science teacher showed us in class. What really makes me passionate about my role are the people I work with, and the things I get to work on. Patricia is an amazing scientist, cofounder and CEO, and her passion for aerogel is infectious if you ever meet her. We also have a phenomenal staff and network of commercial and scientific partners that we work with to bring our vision for Westwood Aerogel to life. Beyond operations, I spend a lot of my time tackling weird, challenging or otherwise specialized problems that force me to think outside of the box. Put these things together and you get what I consider a dream job.
This or That …
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Cats or Dogs: Dogs
‘Deep tech’ or ‘frontier tech’? Deep tech is frontier tech!
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