Sam Proctor of Proctor Group contacted me 2008/05/15 having seen my mention of the Spacetherm product here on Earth Notes. He is in charge of Spacetherm development and offered to chat to me about existing and upcoming products.
(In fact, he told me about one new product that I'd very much like to try this winter as it would fit in with my general insulation-improvement plans, and as of 2010 I think it's pretty-well known that they have an aerogel-based insulating 'wallpaper' in the works, hopefully due out this year.)
The Spacetherm product at core is a silica-gel-derived aerogel (such as is used by NASA in the Space Shuttle heat-resistant tiles) with an embedded polyester fabric matrix to reduce brittleness.
None of the manufacturing is environmentally unpleasant as he explained it, and in particular, by being able to avoid blowing agents used in other products, there are no harmful leaks/emissions of these agents possible, and thus no ensuing degradation in insulation performance over time. Spacetherm should be good for 50 years without loss of performance, I am told.
The embodied energy is less than most insulation alternatives other than wool.
I asked him about the insulation value of Spacetherm vs (say) blown foam, and Sam suggests that it is up to twice as good, ie a given thickness of Spacetherm will reduce heat loss by as much as twice that the same thickness of foam will, at a cost of maybe 2.5x for the same overall insulation performance. So there's a significant cost premium if you have space for alternatives, but where space is the premium then Spacetherm may well be valuable. (1m^2 of 9mm Spacetherm blanket might cost GBP25, vs 20mm drylining backed by plasterboard at maybe GBP10 for example.)
Spacetherm-P Arrives
I am testing out Spacetherm-P (plasterboard faced). We speced out dry-lining our living room to get its exterior-wall U-value from somewhere between 1 and 2W/Km^2 where it is now down to something closer to modern building regs at 0.3W/K^m2, using conventional Kingspan Kooltherm K17 rigid phenolic insulation with thermal conductivity 0.020--0.022W/Km. Then we adjusted the spec to replace the K17 with Spacetherm-P (0.013W/Km core), and we'll see how easy the material is to use and how well it works in practice. Full write-up here...
Other Names
The product that Proctor brands in the UK as Spacetherm is originally Aspen Aerogel's Space Loft. Other firms use brands such as Spaceline.