I put myself on the line to see who wins in the Battle of flame thrower versus era Joe.

So if you really want to see the insulating properties of aerogel, you gotta put it to the test.

And this material here is like the most insulating right.

What is this?

S o?

This is pirate L X T E.

It's made by Aspen Aero Gel.

So it's one centimetre thick.

It doesn't look like the blue stuff because it's actually a fiberglass blanket that's infused with aero gel by the blue stuff.

He means this silica marriage.

Oh, it's made of the same material as sand or glass.

But if you zoom into the nano scale, you'd see it has a sponge like structure with tiny pores just tens of nana meters across.

Now Air Joe could be up to 99.8% air, but it's a better thermal insulator than air because those pores are so tiny that hot air struggles to diffuse through them.

Plus, the nano scale structure itself is a poor conductor of heat.

But marriage oh is pretty fragile in this form, and so it's not really practical for most uses.

Instead, what you can do is actually take tiny particles of marriage.

Oh, and embed them in a composite material like blankets.

But it has an additional component iron oxide, just basically rust that makes it opaque to infrared radiation.

So it's good stifling conduction conviction and radiation.

And on the other side of this insulating air gel blanket we have bent.

Who?

He's from Cape Cod and responded to a tweet of mine when I asked if anyone in this area has a flame thrower or a not a flamethrower, in this case from the boring company.

Have you ever fired this before?

I have not.

So it will be a first.

Okay, So what we're gonna do is try to test what the temperature is on the far side of that blanket when we put the flame thrower at full bore onto this side.

All right.

Are you ready?

I'm ready.

All right.

Let's give this a try.

Right here.

I have the Fleer thermal camera.

This is the T 10 20 which can record up to 2000 degrees Celsius.

First for comparison.

Let's see what this flamethrower it can do to something that's not marriage.

Oh, let's put it to the test on this supersized Hershey's kiss.

Here you go.

All right, Ben.

Within seconds, the temperature of the chocolate is up to hundreds of degrees Celsius around 30 seconds.

The whole thing starts to collapse even after the flamethrower is removed, parts of the chocolate are still well over 600 degrees Celsius.

I think this is what the Internet likes, like, really hot things applied to, you know, novelty objects.

OK, now is the time to really put Ara gelato test.

He's about to put the flame for our full board on this side of the blanket.

Just one centimeter away will be my hand on the back side of the blanket.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm ready.

Yeah, One heart.

Come in.

No, I don't feel any.

That is three propane burns at about 2000 Celsius.

So this barely feel that is incredible.

Blanket way Feels like feels warm.

What about the other side thing?

So this flame door was producing over 660 degrees Celsius on this side.

Meanwhile, on the other side, we're just measuring about 50 degrees Celsius.

We're going up to the highest range that this camera can do up to 2000 degrees Celsius.

Okay, We're not gonna be able to see much except for the really hot stuff.

Let's go for it.

Okay, that is insane.

But this blanket is still not hot.

You see that with the thermal?

How hot is it?

Degree C on the thermal.

But I got 900 at one point.

Yeah, it's actually still it's over 200 degrees Celsius right now.

Whoa.

Yeah, right there.

And I can still touch it.

Can you see my hand prints after I touched it?

Wow.

Now you might be wondering how it's possible to touch something hotter than 100 degrees Celsius without getting burned.

Well, for that, we need to go to another demonstration.

This is a hot plate set to around 150 degrees Celsius.

And on top of it is a metal plate that is mostly covered in about a millimeter oven hair gel coating called airline.

But a small square in the corner is left uncovered.

This says about 126 127 degrees Celsius.

So clearly hotter than boiling water.

So would you put your hand in boiling water?

I don't think so.

That would hurt.

But what about putting it on this coding?

So let me try.

How's it feel?

Not like 130 degrees.

It feels hot, but yeah, but it doesn't feel like 100 30 degrees.

I wonder to prove the point.

There's some water in a little beaker when I move that figure.

Yeah, totally.

Your handprints.

Thermal handprints left behind.

So I was cooling down the surface over here.

This is not coated.

And this is, I think, slightly hotter.

It's about it's well 180 degrees Celsius.

So that is the part I don't want to touch.

Yeah, definitely want touch because it doesn't have a radio.

This is such a thin coating.

It's about a millimeter.

But even that millimeter of marriage l means that you can touch something that otherwise you would be totally unable to touch.

This would definitely burn.

You get a little beaker of water with a dropper.

Is there you go.

I moved it.

Okay, so take some of that and just approve the point.

Put it on the metal square.

Let me put some of this on that piece.

of metal here.

I'm gonna drop a little bit of water on it.

Yep, that boy so we can see that was really cool.

The drops that splattered off onto the airline, including are not boiling.

Let's have a look here.

And this water doesn't.

Doesn't boil.

Get your finger right next to the metal.

You're right there.

I don't know if this is gonna be like he He transferred through the water.

It gets hot.

Put your finger on there.

A lot of self without the water, right?

Like there.

Yeah.

No big deal, right?

Yeah.

I mean, that's not it's not uncomfortable.

It's clearly hot, but it's but it's not like, you know, putting your hand in boiling water.

We're just kind of crazy because it is hotter than boiling water.

But it just doesn't conduct the energy to your hand that fast.

That's really weird.

The uses for applications, what they call safe touch.

So that's something that would normally instantly burn you something hot enough to boil water you could hold your hand on for minutes.

Okay.

So far in this video, I focused on using marriage l in hot applications, but it works equally well at the other end of the temperature spectrum at cryogenic temperatures.

And this comes in handy for things like liquefied natural gas plants for by NASA.

When they're using liquid helium, you need really good insulation to keep the heat out.

I mean, those cold pipes, if they're not insulated properly, can end up with huge ice falls on them, which not only is inefficient, it's also incredibly dangerous.

So this is one of the major applications for marriage l these days, if you take a piece of cry gel and dip it in liquid nitrogen for a good while, it is still flexible when you bring it out.

That's kind of essential when you're working with material that needs to function at ultra cold temperatures.

Here is a carbon ara gel that has been submerged in liquid nitrogen, and as that liquid nitrogen turns back into the gas state, it functions like its own air hockey puck.

Except instead of the air coming from the table.

It comes from the puck itself.

You can even buy ski jackets these days that have special marriage l lined pockets that stay significantly warmer than standard jacket pockets, and they're specially made for your cell phone so that it doesn't freeze up in the cold weather.

You know, I feel like this is a story of something that started as an oddity as something that didn't really have applications but clearly is an amazing insulation and could be made into a really strong fire retardant material.

Why would they insulate sub sea oil pipelines with this material?

That's a really interesting question.

So this was what we would call the killer app for aero gel.

The oil that comes out of wells in the deep ocean is very viscous and slag e.

And so if you just had a pipe with that oil, it would basically come up.

So what you have to do is put another pipe around and fill that gap with insulation.

It's called a pipe pipe configuration, and so they heat the oil, they have to keep it flowing, but need thio insulate that so that it doesn't lose all of its heat to the cold temperatures of the surrounding ocean.

So if you think about laying pipes like that from a ship, you have these long segments of pipe.

That ship has to be, so pick it up, put over the side of the boat and drop down the ocean.

So, you know, at some point the pipe becomes so big and so heavy and capsized the boat.

So they're really only three vessels on the planet that were big enough to lay that really large diameter pipe for substance.

Oil pipelines.

Aspen A Rosell's came along and said, Hey, guys, we've got this really great new insulation.

It's three times better than Paul your thing, so I can take this much polyurethane foam and shrink it into an insulation that's that much aero gel.

Now.

What it did was a lodger to shrink the outer diameter pipe of his pipe pipe configuration substantially.

And because of that mass reduction from the smaller diameter pipe, all of a sudden 250 ships around the world Kalay that smaller diameter pipe without any loss of performance in the oil pipeline.

And so that resulted in alleviating years backlogs of these pipelines that need to get laid and save billions and billions stars.

Now, when we filmed this video, I knew the title would probably be something like flamethrower versus marriage L but I didn't think of it like a real battle.

Like what would it mean for the Arundel toe win?

That it just, you know, didn't get hot or something?

But as it turns out in the flame through a user manual, it instructs you on Lee to ever pull the trigger for seven seconds at a time maximum.

But to get the shot and to get the blanket hot enough, I frequently told Bento pull the trigger for five or 10 times that long.

I was like, Triple way noticed over the course of the shoot was that the flame thrower was working less and less well and we thought it was out of fuel.

But it just turned out something inside.

It was breaking, and by the end, we couldn't even pull the trigger.

So I'm sorry, Ben.