Sustainable Development and Advanced Technologies: Properties, Perspectives, and Applications of Synthetic Aerogels

Aerogels are novel materials that span the gap between liquids and gases because of their distinctive physical properties, such as high surface area and low thermal conductivity. Aerogels are extremely light, highly porous, and low-density materials, but they may also be made to exhibit mechanical properties like increased stiffness and strength by controlling their feature structures while keeping their relative density low. Due to excellent properties shown by aerogels, they have a lot of different applications and are used in paints, pharmacy, sensors, insulators, acoustics and tank baffles etc. In the recent times, Research and Development have contributed a lot in aerogels but it has not been as successful to industrialise and commercialise a lot of those aerogels such as synthetic and polymer-based aerogels. In this article we will discuss the past, current and future perspectives to overcome such challenges for maximum commercialisation and scale up of aerogels as well as discuss about the properties and applications of different types of aerogels for sustainability and carbon neutrality.