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Silica Gel

Adsorbs moisture and keeps your packages unharmed

Silica gel is available for immediate dispatch straight from stock with up to 15% off larger orders. Used as a desiccant, or drying agent, to keep electronics and other products susceptible to the dangers of moisture when in transit or storage. Our silica packets come in a range of sizes suitable for different packaging applications - if you’re using it, you’ll need about 5g per cubic foot, or 170g per cubic metre.

Despite the name, silica gel is actually very hard, and works by adsorbing liquids without losing any of its own solidity, making it a very effective drying agent, protecting electronics and preserving chemicals and archive documents.

  1. Silica Packets

    Silica Packets

    7 Sizes In Stock

Silica gel is a naturally occurring mineral, but is manufactured synthetically out of sodium silicate. In its natural form it saved lives during World War I, by being placed in gas mask canisters to adsorb gases and vapours – including deadly mustard gas. The man who patented the synthetic form, and thus in the long run created one of the most useful yet least lauded packaging products, was one Walter A Patrick.

You may have noticed that we have used the word adsorb to describe the action of silica gel on liquid, rather than absorb. This is because absorption is the “transfer of a volume into a volume...a permeation or dissolution of a volume of energy or mass intoanother volume of energy or mass” whereas adsorptionis the “transfer of a volume onto a surface...an accumulation, or massing, of energy or matter onto a surface.”