Abstract
Chitosan (CTS) aerogel is a new type of functional material that could be possibly applied in the thermal insulation field, especially in energy-saving buildings. However, the inhibition method for the very big shrinkage of CTS aerogels from the final gel to the aerogel is challenging, causing great difficulty in achieving a near-net shape of CTS aerogels. Here, this study explored a facile strategy for restraining CTS-based aerogels’ inherent shrinkage depending on the chemical crosslinking and the interpenetrated supramolecular interaction by introducing nanofibrillar cellulose (NFC) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) chains. The effects of different aspect ratios of NFC on the CTS-based aerogels were systematically analyzed. The results showed that the optimal aspect ratio for NFC introduction was 37.5 from the comprehensive property perspective. CTS/PVA/NFC hybrid aerogels with the aspect ratio of 37.5 for NFC gained a superior thermal conductivity of 0.0224 W/m·K at ambient atmosphere (the cold surface temperature was only 33.46 °C, despite contacting the hot surface of 80.46 °C), a low density of 0.09 g/cm3, and a relatively high compressive stress of 0.51 MPa at 10% strain.
Highlights
Academic Editors: Shulin Yang and Climate change due to global energy resource consumption has been widely recognized as the most urgent issue for humanity in the twenty-first century
The sol-gel process is critical for forming a porous network of CTS/PVA/NFC hybrid aerogels (CPNAs)
In the XPS spectrum (Figure 1), the peaks detected at binding energies of 284.5 (C 1s), 286.1 (C 1s), 399.7 (N 1s), and 532.2 (O 1s) represented CPNAs generated by C–N, C=N, N–C–N, and
Summary
Academic Editors: Shulin Yang and Climate change due to global energy resource consumption has been widely recognized as the most urgent issue for humanity in the twenty-first century. Developing new and efficient thermal insulation materials effectively alleviates this energy crisis [5,6,7]. Preparing aerogel thermal insulation materials from natural biomass sources can effectively reduce their environmental load [17,18,19,20]. A reliable synthetic strategy was proposed to substantially restrain the uniaxial shrinkage of CTS aerogels using the physical/chemical entanglement of the nanofibrillar cellulose (NFC) chains within/outside the CTS chains as well as the supramolecular reaction of linear PVA. This strategy is based on the previous research of our team [30]. The results of this work are expected to achieve further progress in overcoming the formidable challenges of shrinking biomass aerogels, rendering them a promising potential candidate for powerful insulation in the construction sector [26]
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