Aerogels have their COST Action
24 June 2019
37 countries have confirmed their participation in the Horizon2020-funded COST Action AERoGels project.
COST? What is a COST? First of all, it is a programme dedicated to European Cooperation in Science and Technology which helps connecting research initiatives on selected topics across Europe and beyond. COST Actions are bottom-up networks that boost research, innovation and careers.
For COST Action AERoGELS, this is Tatiana Budtova, professor at CEMEF – MINES ParisTech and Francisco Ruiz from Keey Aerogel who have been appointed to represent France.
Tatiana is the head of BIO Team, « Bio-based Polymers and Composites » at CEMEF. CEMEF is world reknown leader in bio-aerogels, started working on this topic in early 21st century within the European project AeroCell. Since then, Tatiana and her team achieved great scientific progress in the field.
In the current Action, Tatiana has also been named head of the working group on environmental applications of aerogels.
In this Action, the use of aerogels will be focused on environmental and life sciences applications. Interest will be on treatment and removal of pollutants, energy management, life cycle analysis as well as pharmaceutical and bio-medical needs. The originality will be the combination of structure-properties correlations, regulatory aspects and circular economy approaches.
Aerogels are a special class of lightweight nanostructured materials with high and open porosity, very high internal pore surface area and tunable physicochemical properties. These properties make aerogels extremely versatile materials for numerous applications. Although some types of aerogels have already reached the market in construction materials and aerospace engineering, the full potential of aerogels is still to be discovered, tells us Tatiana. The interest of this Action is its interdisciplinarity between sectors with very little connexion. The long-term scope of this Action is to develop an aerogel technology able to improve the welfare of European people and to move towards cleaner and smarter production in Europe.
AERoGel COST Action started on April 30th, 2019 for a 4-year period with 37 European countries as well as Jordan, Russia and Costa Rica.
>> Visit AERoGELS COST Action website