Abstract The conventional manufacturing processes of aerogel insulation material is largely relying on the supercritical drying, which suffers from issues of massive energy consumption, high-cost equipment, and prolonged processing time. With the consideration of large market demand of the aerogel insulation material in the next decade, a low-cost and scalable fabrication technique is highly desired. In this paper, a direct ink writing (DIW) method is used to three-dimensionally fabricate the silica aerogel insulation material, followed by room-temperature and ambient pressure drying. Compared to the supercritical drying and freeze-drying, the reported method significantly reduces the fabrication time and costs. The cost-effective DIW technique offers the capability to print complex hollow internal structures, coupled with the porous structure, is found to be beneficial to the thermal insulation property. The addition of fiber to the ink assures the durability of the fabricated product, without sacrificing the thermal insulation performance. The foam ink preparation methods and the printability are demonstrated in this paper, along with the printing of complex three-dimensional geometries. The thermal insulation performance of the printed objects is characterized, and the mechanical properties are also examined. The proposed approach is found to have 56% reduction in the processing time. The printed silicamore »
Tailoring thermal insulation architectures from additive manufacturing
Tailoring thermal transport by structural parameters could result in mechanically fragile and brittle networks. An indispensable goal is to design hierarchical architecture materials that combine thermal and mechanical properties in a continuous and cohesive network. A promising strategy to create such a hierarchical network targets additive manufacturing of hybrid porous voxels at nanoscale. Here we describe the convergence of agile additive manufacturing of porous hybrid voxels to tailor hierarchically and mechanically tunable objects. In one strategy, the uniformly distributed porous silica voxels, which form the basis for the control of thermal transport, are non-covalently interfaced with polymeric networks, yielding hierarchic super-elastic architectures with thermal insulation properties. Another additive strategy for achieving mechanical strength involves the versatile orthogonal surface hybridization of porous silica voxels retains its low thermal conductivity of 19.1 mW m−1 K−1, flexible compressive recovery strain (85%), and tailored mechanical strength from 71.6 kPa to 1.5 MPa. The printed lightweight high-fidelity objects promise thermal aging mitigation for lithium-ion batteries, providing a thermal management pathway using 3D printed silica objects.
- Award ID(s):
- 1846863
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10375087
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Publisher:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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