Chemistry of Aerogels and Their Applications

Abstract

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Ultralight nanofibre-assembled cellular aerogels with superelasticity and multifunctionality

“…This scaling law also affects the structural stability of self-supporting cellular materials, imposing a lower bound on density 7,9 . In contrast, most existing ultralight materials [45][46][47] , such as carbon foams and silica aerogels, follow a steeper scaling of E/E s B(r/r s ) 3 (Fig. 3a) due to the inefficient load transfer between ligaments.…”

“…Aerogels are among the most well-known thermal insulation materials with extraordinarily low thermal conductivity originating from their high porosity 3,48 . As illustrated in Fig.…”

“…U ltra-low density materials are attractive for their wide range of applications in the fields of thermal insulation, catalyst supports, tissue engineering, battery electrodes and acoustic, vibration or shock energy damping [1][2][3][4] . The ultralight regime below 10 mg cm À 3 currently contains very few materials: silica colloid aerogels (41 mg cm À 3 ), carbon nanotube aerogels (40.16 mg cm À 3 ), graphene monoliths (40.5 mg cm À 3 ), aerographite (40.18 mg cm À 3 ), and metal microlattices (40.9 mg cm À 3 ) (refs 5-9).…”

Versatile Double-Cross-Linking Approach to Transparent, Machinable, Supercompressible, Highly Bendable Aerogel Thermal Superinsulators

“…Because of their homogeneous nanostructure, some aerogels, especially silica aerogels, are transparent in the visible light wavelengths, which makes them ideal materials as thermally superinsulating windows for efficient energy savings in houses and buildings. 9,10 Aerogels are, however, usually mechanically weak (friable) resulting from their thin skeletons and their practical applications have been limited. Hybridization of aerogels with organic compounds is widely studied to improve their mechanical properties.…”

A finite-volume fast diffusion-limited aggregation model for predicting the coagulation rate of mixed low-ionized system

“…The diffused-limited aggregation occurs when the repulsive force between particles could be negligible so that the coagulation rate is solely determined by the time taken for clusters to encounter each other. 4,5 The DLCA theory is usually suitable for ion system whose interaction between particles is exponential damping according to electric double layer theory. 6 It gives scientists a feasible way to design the micro-structure of the aerogels, 7,8 but it also has many limitations 9,10 because of the huge calculation amount to introduce the long distant interaction between particles which definitely cannot be ignored under some condition such as the system in the ethanol solution due to its low ionization.…”