Super Elastic and Thermally Insulating Carbon Aerogel: Go Tubular Like Polar Bear Hair

Fabrication of super-thermally insulating material with outstanding mechanical property is fascinating yet limited by synthetic challenge. Recently in Chem, inspired by the tubular structure of polar bear hair, Yu and co-workers reported on a simple, scalable solution-based strategy to fabricate macroscopic-scale carbon tube aerogel (CTA) with super-elasticity and thermal insulation. The interconnected tubular structure with an optimized tube thickness contributes to both excellent anti-fatigue mechanical properties upon more than one million compress-release cycles at 30% strain and super-thermal insulation with an extremely low thermal conductivity of 23 mW m−1 K−1.