Highly stretchable carbon aerogels

Fan Guo,Weiwei Gao,Pei Zhao,Yingjun Liu,Zhen Xu,Hongtao Wang,Bo Fang,Yanqiu Jiang,Youhua Xiao,Chao Gao

doi:10.1038/s41467-018-03268-y

Abstract

Carbon aerogels demonstrate wide applications for their ultralow density, rich porosity, and multifunctionalities. Their compressive elasticity has been achieved by different carbons. However, reversibly high stretchability of neat carbon aerogels is still a great challenge owing to their extremely dilute brittle interconnections and poorly ductile cells. Here we report highly stretchable neat carbon aerogels with a retractable 200% elongation through hierarchical synergistic assembly. The hierarchical buckled structures and synergistic reinforcement between graphene and carbon nanotubes enable a temperature-invariable, recoverable stretching elasticity with small energy dissipation (~0.1, 100% strain) and high fatigue resistance more than 106 cycles. The ultralight carbon aerogels with both stretchability and compressibility were designed as strain sensors for logic identification of sophisticated shape conversions. Our methodology paves the way to highly stretchable carbon and neat inorganic materials with extensive applications in aerospace, smart robots, and wearable devices.

Highlights

Carbon aerogels demonstrate wide applications for their ultralow density, rich porosity, and multifunctionalities
Our binary CAs (bCAs) were fabricated by ink-printing homogeneous aqueous mixtures of graphene oxide (GO) and purified multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs), followed by freezedrying and reduction under confined state (Fig. 1a)
The past decades have witnessed the achieving of highly compressible Carbon aerogels (CAs), whereas highly stretchable neat CAs are deemed as impossible[20, 53]

Summary

Introduction

Carbon aerogels demonstrate wide applications for their ultralow density, rich porosity, and multifunctionalities. Carbon aerogels (CAs) have characteristics of ultralow density, rich porosity, high conductivity, and extreme environmental stabilities[1,2,3,4,5], which allow wide applications such as damping components[2, 3], environmental protections[6,7,8], energy storages[9,10,11,12,13], sensors[14, 15], catalysts[16, 17], and electromagnetic metamaterials[18, 19]. Blending with polymers weakens the favorable functionalities of CAs such as highly electrical conductivity and low density Another approach is to enhance interconnections of CAs34–39. Our assembly strategy opens the avenue to highly stretchable carbon and other neat inorganic materials for wide applications in aerospace, smart robots, and wearable devices

Methods

Results

Conclusion