Recent Advances in Aerogel Materials from Electrospun Nanofibers: A Review

Aerogel is a category of material with hierarchically engineered porous structure and three-dimensional interconnected network. It possesses sparkling features like ultralow density and ultrahigh porosity and has immense prospects in many applications. Since their first realistic practice in 2014, electrospun nanofibers have brought tremendous promises in applications of aerogel materials due to gelation-free synthesis and more importantly controllable characteristics from diversified materials such as polymer, carbon, ceramic, etc., to a variety of morphology, structure, composition, and functionality. Electrospinning provides endless possibilities for the fast development of various aerogel materials. Pondering these benefits, electrospun nanofibrous aerogel materials have become a hot research topic in the past decade. Despite numerous successful processing and utilization of electrospun nanofibrous aerogels, there is a lack of studies to correlate material design with application performance. In this review, we described the most recent advances of electrospun nanofibrous aerogels particularly in the years of 2020s and emphasized designing ideas and processing-structure-property-application relationship. Our intention is to provide a systematic picture of aerogels from electrospun nanofibers in the past 3 years, inspire new aerogel materials design, and stimulate interests in both academia and industry in this converging sector of aerogel materials and fibers.