How much does aerogel cost?

Well you’ve come to the right place. BuyAerogel.com has the world’s most extensive catalog of aerogel products so we are well positioned to answer this one.

First, there are different types of aerogel

Commercial aerogel products come in a few different form factors—monoliths, particles, blankets, and panels—as well as different compositions, such as silica, hydrophobic silica, carbon, and polymer. The price of each aerogel product depends on its form factor and composition as well as the application it is intended for.

In general, aerogel particles and aerogel blankets are the cheapest forms of aerogel available. Particles are used as additives to make paints and coatings more insulating, while blankets are used to insulate large surfaces like pipes and tight spaces between walls. Particles and some blankets can be made using a continuous manufacturing process without a high-pressure step and so they are able to be made at large scale economically.

The pretty shaped holographic blue kind of aerogel is referred to as a silica aerogel monolith. These are the most expensive kind of aerogel because they are made through a batch process that usually involves a high-pressure step and are very brittle so batch yields are not always 100%. They are also of limited practical use so they are not manufactured at industrial scale like particles or blankets.

Aerogel panels and their smaller cousins aerogel tiles are usually made of mechanically robust polymers like polyureas, polyurethanes, and polyimides. These materials are newer than silica aerogels and are currently more expensive but they are being scaled up in industry and prices for them are coming down. They also offer unique advantages over silica aerogels in that they are not dusty and can be handled and machined like plastics, making them useful for things other than insulation.

Example prices for various aerogel products

As for some ballpark prices, on BuyAerogel.com a one-inch silica aerogel monolith is $35, a bottle of 100 cc of hydrophobic silica aerogel particles is $15, and one-foot by one-foot cuts of aerogel blankets go for about $30 depending on thickness.  At scale, aerogel particles can be as cheap as $6000 per cubic meter, while insulating blankets can go as low as $3/square foot. Note these are just ballpark prices for reference only in 2025 dollars and assume industrial volumes.

So how much would one pound of aerogel cost? A gram? A kilogram?

As discussed cost depends on the aerogel product form factor and composition, but let’s take hydrophobic silica aerogel particles as an easy example.  Note aerogel particles are usually sold by volume, not weight, because they are so light and difficult to weigh large volumes accurately as a result.  Take the 100-cc sample bottle mentioned above—at $15 a bottle that works out to about 15 cents per cubic centimeter. Given the tap density of such particles is typically around 0.06-0.07 grams per cubic centimeter, that works out to a cost of about $2.20 per gram, $22 per kilogram, and conveniently $10 per pound.  For large volumes, costs on the order of a third of that are reasonable. Contact us for volume pricing!

What is aerogel used for?

There are many uses for aerogels and different aerogel products are suited for different applications.  Common uses for aerogel include thermal superinsulating blankets that are 2-3x better than fiberglass, used in everything from subsea oil pipelines to oil refineries to energy-efficient buildings to electric vehicle batteries. Aerogel particles are used in energy-efficient skylights and as performance additives to make paints and.coatings more insulating and to prevent contact burns on hot surfaces. Aerogel panels like Airloy aerogels are used as lightweight plastics replacements and superinsulating structures in rockets, aircraft, and appliances.

How does aerogel stop a bullet?

Not very well on its own. Most if not all aerogels would be easily obliterated or fully penetrated by a bullet. Think shooting a styrofoam cup with a gun. Who wins? Definitely the gun.

But! When some aerogel materials, like Airloy HR sheet, are added to a bulletproof vest or shield, they can reduce bullet penetration depth by 50%—that’s the difference between life and death in many cases. That’s because aerogels have two magic properties that come into play in ballistics. First, aerogel has extremely high internal surface area, something akin to a football field wrapped up in the volume of an ice cube. When a bullet contacts the vest or shield, which usually is made of ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene fiber, the kinetic energy from the bullet rattles all that surface area and the aerogel spreads the energy out over a wider area than just the cross section of the bullet, resulting in a wider, shallower welt on the back face. Second, aerogels exhibit unmatched sound-reflecting properties, meaning they reflect a lot of the energy from the incident shockwave that accompanies the bullet.

So once again the superpowers of aerogel comes to the rescue when it comes to stopping bullets, but as a component of ballistics protective equipment, not on its own.

How does aerogel work?

Usually when people ask this question they want to understand why is aerogel such a good insulator.  This is because aerogels are nanoporous solids, essentially foams made of nanosized air pockets a thousand times smaller than a red blood cell. These nanopores are so small that on average they are three to six times smaller than the mean free path of a molecule of air at room temperature.  As a result, even though aerogels are mostly air by volume, atmospheric air cannot carry heat through them by convection, making them highly insulating. This effect is known as the Knudsen effect and is why aerogels are superinsulating.

What are the downsides of using aerogel?

Aerogel products provide many advantages such as vastly superior thermal insulation performance, low weight, and maximum performance in the least amount of space. Aerogel insulation blankets like Pyrogel and Cryogel tend to be very dusty and shed a hydrophobic dust onto surfaces when handled, which is real annoying. Installing them usually also requires some sort of fastening like a wire or compression between two surfaces. That said, there are low-dust aerogel blankets like Thermal Wrap and no-dust aerogel blankets like Airloy HR and Airloy HT now as well. Additionally, aerogel insulation products are generally about three times more expensive than incumbent aerogel materials like fiberglass even when normalized by performance per unit thickness. But for applications where every ounce counts, or space as at a premium, or energy equals dollars, there’s no better technology than aerogel.

Is aerogel hard or soft?

Hardness refers to how easily a material can be dented or scratched, but is often colloquially used to refer to whether a material is stiff or compliant. Most aerogels are firm but not very stiff or hard, and most are very brittle and shatter or pulverize easily. Think the fracture behavior of a Rice Krispie. The most durable aerogels, Airloy polymer aerogels, feel like something between stiff foam and wood, depending on density. In contrast, some exotic aerogels such as those made from graphene or carbon nanotubes are extremely squishy, and can be compressed up to ninety percent reversibly.

Learn how to make aerogel

If you are interested in making aerogel yourself, you’ll find an in-depth guide on how to make aerogels of various kinds at Aerogel.org. For even more aerogel recipes, check out The Springer Handbook of Aerogels, which has an extensive chapter called “Recipes and Designs for Aerogels”.