Mechanically Resistant and Sustainable Cellulose-Based Composite Aerogels with Excellent Flame Retardant, Sound-Absorption, and Superantiwetting Ability for Advanced Engineering Materials

Abstract

The production of cellulose-based aerogels from the conversion of cheap and rich precursors using environmentally friendly techniques is a very attractive subject in materials chemistry. In this work, we report a facile strategy to construct flame retardant, sound-adsorption, and mechanical enhancement cellulose-based composite aerogels by the incorporation of aluminum hydroxide nanoparticles (AH NPs) into cellulose gels via an in situ sol–gel process, followed by freeze-drying to coat AH NPs on cellulose composite aerogels (AH NPs@cellulose composite aerogels). The results demonstrated that the AH NP homogeneous dispersion within cellulose aerogels and the presence of AH NPs did not have a remarkable influence on the homogeneous porous structure of cellulose aerogels when compared with cellulose aerogels prepared from the NaOH/urea/thiourea solution. The prepared composite cellulose aerogels showed excellent flame retardancy, the peak of heat release rate (PHRR) of the composite aerogels decreased signif...