Strong yet flexible ceramic aerogel

Ceramic aerogels are highly efficient, lightweight, and chemically stable thermal insulation materials but their application is hindered by their brittleness and low strength. Flexible nanostructure-assembled compressible aerogels have been developed to overcome the brittleness but they still show low strength, leading to insufficient load-bearing capacity. Here we designed and fabricated a laminated SiC-SiOx nanowire aerogel that exhibits reversible compressibility, recoverable buckling deformation, ductile tensile deformation, and simultaneous high strength of up to an order of magnitude larger than other ceramic aerogels. The aerogel also shows good thermal stability ranging from -196 degrees C in liquid nitrogen to above 1200 degrees C in butane blow torch, and good thermal insulation performance with a thermal conductivity of 39.3 +/- 0.4 mW m-1 K-1. These integrated properties make the aerogel a promising candidate for mechanically robust and highly efficient flexible thermal insulation materials. Mechanically robust, flexible and thermally insulating ceramic aerogels are challenging to obtain due to the conflicting nature of these properties. Here the authors resolved these contradictions and developed a strong yet flexible aerogel, for application in extreme conditions, by laminated structure design.