Large-Scale Nanofiber Manufacturing| Industrial Scale Sea-lsland Melt-Spun Continuous UltrafineFibers for Highly Comfortable Insulated Aerogel Felt Clothing

Adv. Mater. (IF 27.4): Industrial-Scale Continuous Ultrafine Fibers for High-Comfort, Warm Aerogel-Felt Clothing

Challenge: Aerogels, with their high porosity and ultra-low thermal conductivity, are excellent thermal insulators widely used in insulated clothing. However, mechanical fragility and structural instability limit their practical applications.

Approach: Academician Zhu Meifang, Associate Professor Cheng Yanhua, and Researcher Hu Zexu (Donghua University) addressed these challenges by developing industrial-scale island-in-sea melt-electrospinning technology to produce ultrafine fibers. The resulting fibers have large and uniform length/diameter ratios, serving as building blocks assembled into aerogel felts with corrugated lamellar structures via freeze-forming.

Innovation 1: These aerogels exhibit outstanding mechanical properties, meeting textile elasticity and comfort demands, including ultra-flexibility (25% tensile strain, 95% compression, 180° bending) and fatigue resistance (>10,000 cycles). They also offer self-cleaning, waterproof, breathable, and flame-retardant properties, suitable for extreme environments.

Innovation 2: The aerogel-felt clothing demonstrates exceptional thermal insulation, nearing dry air’s performance, while being only one-third the thickness of down jackets with comparable insulation.