Inside Back Cover: Recent advances in novel aerogels through the hybrid aggregation of inorganic nanomaterials and polymeric fibers for thermal insulation

Abstract: Aerogel is a nanoporous solid material with ultrahigh porosity, ultralow density,and thermal conductivity, which is considered to be one of the most promisinghigh-performance insulation materials today. However, traditional pure inorganicaerogels (i.e., silica aerogel) exhibit inherent structural brittleness, making theirprocessing and handling difficult, and their manufacturing costs are relatively high,which limits their large-scale practical use. The recently developed aerogel basedon polymer nanofibers has ultralow thermal conductivity and density, excellentelasticity, and designable multifunction. More importantly, one-dimensional poly-mer nanofibers are directly used as building blocks to construct the network ofaerogels via a gelation-free process. This greatly simplifies the aerogel prepara-tion process, thereby bringing opportunities for large-scale aerogel applications. Theaggregation of inorganic nanomaterials and polymer nanofibers is considered to be avery attractive strategy for obtaining highly flexible, easily available, and multifunc-tional composite aerogels. Therefore, this review summarizes the r ecent advances innovel aerogels through the hybrid aggregation of inorganic nanomaterials and poly-meric fibers for thermal insulation. The main processing routes, porous microstruc-ture, mechanical properties, and thermal properties and applications of theseaerogels are highlighted. In addition, various future challenges faced by these aero-gels in thermal insulation applications are discussed in this review.

Qiongzhen Liu, et al. Recent advances in novel aerogels through the hybrid aggregation of inorganic nanomaterials and polymeric fibers for thermal insulation. Aggregate [J], 2021, e30.