(Photo: Ryan Chen/LLNL)
Aerogels
have long been one of those ‘gee whiz’ materials that gets people to
take notice—watching a solid float on air tends to do that. To
accomplish their remarkable feats, aerogels are essentially a gel in
which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with gas. We’ve
seen them used in applications from “invisibility cloaks” to oil spill
remediation.
Now researchers at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL) have produced an aerogel out of graphene
that could have applications ranging from electronics to energy storage.
Boosting the ‘gee whiz’ factor: the new material is produced through
3-D printing.
In research published in Nature
Communications, the LLNL research team were able to produce a
predetermined architecture for a graphene-based aerogel, which
previously had always been random, by using 3-D printing. By being able
to define the architecture, the researchers were able to improve the
material’s performance.
The 3-D printing process
used for fabricating these aeorgels is called direct ink writing. In the
process, graphene oxide (GO) inks are combined with an aqueous GO
suspension and a silica filler to create the ink. This ink is then
extruded through a micronozzle to layer up the structure. The final
structure is then put into hydrofluoric acid where the silica is burned
off. You can see this process in the video below:
“Making
graphene aerogels with tailored macro-architectures for specific
applications with a controllable and scalable assembly method remains a
significant challenge that we were able to tackle,” said engineer Marcus
Worsley, a co-author of the paper, in a press release. “3D printing
allows one to intelligently design the pore structure of the aerogel,
permitting control over mass transport (aerogels typically require high
pressure gradients to drive mass transport through them due to small,
tortuous pore structure) and optimization of physical properties, such
as stiffness. This development should open up the design space for using
aerogels in novel and creative applications.”
The
researchers believe that being able to tailor the architecture of the
aerogels will open up the possibility of using them in applications that
they were excluded from previously, such as pressure sensors and flow
batteries.
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