Fast and scalable production of crosslinked polyimide aerogel fibers for ultrathin thermoregulating clothes

Abstract

Polyimide aerogel fibers hold promise for intelligent thermal management fabrics, but their scalable production faces challenges due to the sluggish gelation kinetics and the weak backbone strength. Herein, a strategy is developed for fast and scalable fabrication of crosslinked polyimide (CPI) aerogel fibers by wet-spinning and ambient pressure drying via UV-enhanced dynamic gelation strategy. This strategy enables fast sol-gel transition of photosensitive polyimide, resulting in a strongly-crosslinked gel skeleton that effectively maintains the fiber shape and porous nanostructure. Continuous production of CPI aerogel fibers (length of hundreds of meters) with high specific modulus (390.9 kN m kg−1) can be achieved within 7 h, more efficiently than previous methods (>48 h). Moreover, the CPI aerogel fabric demonstrates almost the same thermal insulating performance as down, but is about 1/8 the thickness of down. The strategy opens a promisingly wide-space for fast and scalable fabrication of ultrathin fabrics for personal thermal management.

Strong, Tough, and Recyclable Aramid Aerogel Fibers with Homogeneous Nanoscale Structures for High-Temperature Thermal Insulation Applications

“…Notably, the strength is much higher than previously reported aramid or its composite aerogel fibers by phase separation (0.5–8.1 MPa) ,− and is even comparable to aramid aerogel fibers from highly concentrated (10 wt %) aramid nanofiber liquid crystal with further drafting treatment (41 MPa) . Our HAAFs also possess superior strength to recently reported other aerogel fibers, such as polyimide aerogel fibers (2.1–22 MPa), ,,, cellulose aerogel fibers (5.8–30.0 MPa), − and core–shell structured chitosan-TPU aerogel fibers (12.7 MPa) . Noteworthily, our HAAF-5 achieves a large elongation at break of 99.1% with a C s of 4 wt %, which surpasses all previously reported aramid aerogel fibers (10–40%). − The comparison of the strength, elongation, and thermal conductivity properties with other aerogel fibers in Figure S8.The calculated toughness is as high as 23.14 MJ/m 3 , rivaling that of high-toughness cellulose aerogel fibers in a very recent work .…”

Thermally Conductive and UV-EMI Shielding Electronic Textiles for Unrestricted and Multifaceted Health Monitoring

“…Skin-attachable electronics need accessibility to heat dissipation to maintain thermal comfort on the human skin [ 56 , 57 ]. As illustrated in Fig.…”

Topological Polymer Networks-Enabled Mechanically Strong Polyamide-Imide Aerogel Fibers for Thermal Insulation in Harsh Environments

“…The thermal conductivity of PAI aerogel fiber fabrics was significantly better than those of most reported LPF-PAF (40.1 mW/(m·K)), PI-AF (28.7 ± 2.0 mW/(m·K)), ANF/CNT-AF (42–60 mW/(m·K)), and PI/Ti 3 C 2 T x -AF (36 mW/(m·K)) fabrics. The intuitive comparison to illustrate the superior thermal conductivity of the PAI/PU@340 fabric is given in Figure d, and the detailed information about thermal conductivity could be found in Table S5. ,,,,− …”