Additive Manufacturing of Resilient SiC Nanowire Aerogels

Resilient ceramic aerogels are emerging as a fascinating material that features light weight, low thermal conductivity, and recoverable compressibility, promising widespread prospects in the fields of heat insulation, catalysis, filtration, and aerospace exploration. However, the construction of the resilient ceramic aerogels with rational designed multiscale architectures aiming for tunable physical and mechanical performances remains a major challenge. Here, 3D constructed resilient SiC nanowire aerogels possessing programmed geometries and engineered mechanical properties are created via additive manufacturing. The Young's modulus of the fabricated SiC nanowire aerogel lattices are tuned systematically from 0.012 MPa to 5.800 MPa spanning over 2 orders of magnitude. More importantly, the customized lightweight and resilient SiC nanowire aerogels show a low thermal conductivity (0.046 W m-1 K-1). The present work provides another approach to the design and rapid fabrication of resilient ceramic aerogels toward flexible thermal management devices, lightweight engineered structures, and other potential applications.