Preparation And Applications Of Biomimetic Cellular Materials

Freeze casting has received increasing attention as a processing method for fabricating biomimetic porous mateials since it is fast,scalable,and environmental friendly.Animals living in the extremely cold environment,such as polar bears have shown amazing capability to keep warm,which benefit from their hollow hairs.Mimicking such strategy in synthetic fibers would stimulate smart textiles for efficient personal thermal management,which plays an important role in preventing heat loss and improving efficiency in house warming energy consumption.Here,we use a 'freeze-spinning' method to realize continuous and large-scale fabrication of fibers with aligned porous structure,mimicking polar bear hairs,which is difficult to achieve by other methods.Textile woven with such biomimetic fibers shows excellent thermal insulating property as well as good breathability and wearability.In addition to passively insulate heat loss,the textile could also function as a wearable heater,when doped with electro-heating materials such as carbon nanotubes(CNTs),to induce fast thermal response and uniform electro-heating while maintaining its soft and porous nature for comfortable wearing.Ultrafast liquid absorption play a crucial role in many occasions,such as crude oil-spill accidents,stop bleeding quickly in surgery,urine treatment of astronauts.Many materials have been designed to absorb liquid,but it is still challenging to find materials that can achieve both ultrafast liquid absorption and automatic self-squeezing property.Here,we prepare an aligned porous sponge that exhibits ultra-fast oil absorption performance compared to the random porous sponge and commercial sponge as well as automatic self-extrusion property,which has potential in fast liquid absorption.