title: A facile route for 3D aerogels from nanostructured 1D and 2D materials.
abstract: Aerogels have numerous applications due to their high surface area and low densities. However, creating aerogels from a large variety of materials has remained an outstanding challenge. Here, we report a new methodology to enable aerogel production with a wide range of materials. The method is based on the assembly of anisotropic nano-objects (one-dimensional (1D) nanotubes, nanowires, or two-dimensional (2D) nanosheets) into a cross-linking network from their colloidal suspensions at the transition from the semi-dilute to the isotropic concentrated regime. The resultant aerogels have highly porous and ultrafine three-dimensional (3D) networks consisting of 1D (Ag, Si, MnO(2), single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs)) and 2D materials (MoS(2), graphene, h-BN) with high surface areas, low densities, and high electrical conductivities. This method opens up a facile route for aerogel production with a wide variety of materials and tremendous opportunities for bio-scaffold, energy storage, thermoelectric, catalysis, and hydrogen storage applications.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. sungmij@mit.edu
authors.forename: Sung Mi
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Jung
authors.forename: Hyun Young
authors.initials: HY
authors.lastname: Jung
authors.forename: Mildred S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Dresselhaus
authors.forename: Yung Joon
authors.initials: YJ
authors.lastname: Jung
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kong