Well-cushioned and highly-elastic aerogel for multifunctional intelligent transportation packaging

Modern logistics applications demand intelligent packaging aerogels with excellent mechanical properties, but these materials typically do not display good resilience or dynamic cushioning. Here, we propose a facile strategy to fabricate a lamellar porous composite aerogel (CB-CNF/MXene) by the crosslinking and bidirectional freeze-drying of cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) and MXene. The obtained CB-CNF/MXene aerogel showed good resilience and dynamic cushioning capacity, could withstand up to 90 % compressive strain, bounced back to 87.1 % of its original height, and remained stable for 1000 cycles under 80 % strain. It displayed a significantly lower maximum acceleration of 27.4 g than that of expanded polyethylene (35.9 g) and expanded polystyrene (34.1 g), indicating its effective protection characteristics. CB-CNF/MXene also displayed a stable piezoresistive sensing capability of up to 4.11 kPa, demonstrating its suitability for real-time cargo monitoring. It also showed a relatively low thermal conductivity of 29.2 mW·m−1·K−1, making it suitable for cold chain transportation.