“…This technique largely attenuates the capillary stresses responsible for the gel network compression, its shrinkage and its porosity loss [12]. It was shown that extremely high porous silica aerogels could be obtained with high specific surface areas (500-1,000 m 2 /g), low bulk densities (0.003-0.35 g/cm 3 ), low thermal conductivities (0.014 W/m K), and refractive indices between 1.008 and 1.4 [13]. Aerogels became an important research area for a wide range of scientific and technological applications, for instance, thermal and acoustic insulation [14,15], Cerenkov radiation detectors [16], photoluminescent and radioluminescent devices [17][18][19], comet dust and aerosol particles collectors [20,21], adsorbents [22], catalysts [23] and catalyst supports [24][25][26][27][28].…”