Cheap electricity, lighter airplanes from rice husks?

BEIJING, March 3 (Xinhuanet) -- A Malaysian scientist says she can use discarded rice husks to make a high-tech material -- invented by an American scientist in 1931 -- to protect buildings from bomb blasts, reduce electricity bills and make lighter airplanes and tennis racquets.

Halimaton Hamdan, a University of Cambridge-trained chemistry professor, says her process cuts the cost of producing aerogel -- the lightest solid known to man -- by 80 percent, making it so affordable that it could become a commonplace material with widespread use.

Hamdan's process is experimental and several years away from commercial use. The Malaysian government is funding a 62.5-million-U.S.-dollar project at Halimaton's university in the southern town of Skudai to try to demonstrate that it can be produced on a large scale. She says 3.5 ounces will cost 60 dollars to make, compared to 300 dollars using conventional methods.

The greatest potential lies in coating walls of homes with aerogel, Halimaton says, which could dramatically reduce the need for heating and air conditioning. Aerogel provides 37 times more effective insulation than traditional fiberglass, according to ICE Circle, a British nonprofit group that promotes new technologies to fight climate change.

"I hope one day this product will be used by a variety of industries and benefit mankind," Halimaton told The Associated Press in her one-story laboratory at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.

She "seems to have found a miracle solution" to make aerogel cheaply, said Vincent Blech, a scientist at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo.

Nicknamed "frozen smoke" because of its cloudy appearance, aerogel is made from silica, the basic ingredient in sand, and is 99 percent air by volume. The result is a nearly weightless and translucent material with a white powder that seems to float inside. What makes aerogel so attractive is the combination of light weight with incredible strength and insulating properties.

Aerogel can withstand mechanical pressure 2,000 times its own weight, making it suitable for bombproof panels. It makes good soundproofing material. Aerogel also can absorb oil spills and pollutants in the air ¢w NASA fitted a space probe in 1999 with a mitt packed with the substance to catch the dust from a comet's tail.

(Agencies)