Processing of aerogels and their applications toward CO2 adsorption and electrochemical reduction: a review.

Abstract

Aerogels are a unique class of nanoporous ultralight materials exhibiting wide range of textural characteristic properties and tunable porosities. Due to their remarkable features such as low density, high surface area, low refractive index, small thermal conductivity, low dielectric constant and low sound velocity, they exhibit a wide range of applications in different areas such as electronics, thermal and acoustic insulation, chemistry, biomedicine and optics. The special advantages of these materials are that they can be produced in different forms such as monoliths/granular, bead/microspheres, thin films or sheets and as blankets. Aerogels are found to be potential materials for the removal of CO2 through adsorption or electrochemical reduction. There is a plethora of research on different kinds of aerogels used for CO2 adsorption process. Research has been going on toward the development of aerogel-based electrocatalyst, which can be used for valorization of CO2 through electrochemical reduction methods. Although most of the review papers have covered applications of aerogels in CO2 capture, very few discuss the processing of aerogels, more so on their applications in CO2 valorization. In this review, we have collated literature of different forms of aerogels currently available and the steps involved in their fabrication process. In addition, we have covered applications of aerogels in CO2 capture. Furthermore, we focussed on the basic principles involved in the development of an aerogel electrocatalyst as well as recent developments of aerogels in electrochemical CO2 reduction.