Facile fabrication of superflexible and thermal insulating phenolic aerogels backboned by silicone networks

Aerogels still draw enormous interests of researchers to address the thermal insulating solutions due to environmental and energy challenges. To design and obtain lightweight organic aerogels with flexibility, thermal insulation, and hydrophobicity is one of the future directions. Herein, taking advantage of a 3D silicone framework as the backbone, a set of flexible phenolic aerogels with hierarchical architectures were fabricated by a facile one-pot and ambient pressure drying strategy. The intriguing microstructure afforded the aerogel composites multiple remarkble properties: highly-flexibility with high cyclic compressibility (70 % strain) and 1000 cycles of compression without collapse (40 % strain); excellent thermal insulating performace (insulate 126 °C at 200 °C with a thickness of 10 mm); instantaneous flame retardancy within 2 min; impressive hydrophobicity with high water contact angle of 148.5° and low sliding angle less than 6°. These integrited merits enable the composite aerogels to perform effectively in thermal management applications for long-term.