Utilization and regeneration of waste sugarcane bagasse as a novel robust aerogel as an effective thermal, acoustic insulator, and oil adsorbent

To deal with the frequent oil-spillage, various sorbents were developed, however, the poor oil/water selectivity and expensive hydrophobic coatings limit widespread. Further, the rise in the earth’s temperature and noise pollution enforce the scientific community to develop economic thermal and acoustic insulators. To explore this, the waste sugarcane bagasse was utilized to synthesize an ultra-light, porous, and flexible macroscopic aerogel through a simple and easily scalable two-step process. Through the surface modification with novel Silicon Ceramic coating, it exhibits super-hydrophobicity as revealed from the water contact angle of 140.1°. The synthesized aerogel exhibits low density (0.012–0.108 g/cc), high porosity (92.8–99.2%), high surface area (309.8–368.3 m2/g), low thermal conductivity (0.026–0.044 W/mK), and an excellent sound absorption coefficient of 0.83 (20% superior to the commercial acoustic insulators). Moreover, the oil adsorption investigations revealed that it could uptake 23 times of crude oil of its weight. Furthermore, the adsorbed oil can be effortlessly recovered by acetone treatment for its further usage as an oil sorbent. Besides, it could retain oil uptake capacity up to ten regeneration cycles. Simultaneously, a quadratic correlation for the oil adsorption capacity was developed to optimize the amount of crosslinkers. Again, the high compressive strength (20–41 kPa) of the aerogel couples its usage as an effective material for thermal, acoustic insulation, and oil spill cleaning.