Multifunctional, Ultra-Flyweight, Synergistically Assembled.pdfVIP

2554 www.advmat.de www.MaterialsV C O M M U N IC A TI O N Haiyan Sun , Zhen Xu , and Chao Gao * Multifunctional, Ultra-Flyweight, Synergistically Assembled Carbon Aerogels Since the fi rst report of aerogels by Kistler in 1930s, [ 1 ] several ultralight cellular materials such as silica aerogels, [ 2 ] metallic foams, [ 3 ] CNT aerogels, [ 4 ] and polymer foams [ 5 ] have been pre- pared to exploit their wide applications, covering from thermal insulation to oil or heavy metal-absorption, energy storage, catalyst supports, and supercapacitors. [ 6–11 ] Following the acces- sibility of ultralow density below 10 mg cm ? 3 , the next dream target is to achieve ultra-fl yweight aerogels (UFAs) with a den- sity ( ρ ) less than 1 mg cm ? 3 , which is even smaller than that of air at ambient conditions (1.2 mg cm ? 3 ). Recently, periodic microlattice-constructed Ni foams [ 3 ] with ρ of 0.9 mg cm ? 3 were made by electroless plating and subsequently etching away the polymer template; microtubes-interconneted aerographite [ 12 ] with ρ as low as 0.18 mg cm ? 3 was gained by ZnO template- based CVD approach. The template-directed synthesis strategy could bring the merits of ordered and hierarchical structures, yet in the same breath limits the scalability of resulting aero- gels because of the hard accessibility of well-organized, large- size template itself. A template-free strategy (i.e., a hydrogel or sol-gel method) is desirable for scalable manufacture, but the densities of corresponding aerogels are relatively high ( ρ ≥ 1 mg cm ? 3 ) [ 2 , 13 , 14 ] because of the lack of control over the fi ne structures. Accordingly, to produce UFAs in large-scale with advanced structural design is still a big challenge unresolved. Given their marvelous mechanical strength, low density, fi ne elasticity, good electrical conductivity, and extremely high aspect ratio, [ 15–17 ] CNTs and graphene are theoretically considered as the best candida