Prof. Jinglong Yang’s Group wins 2018 Best Paper Award by Journal of the American Ceramic Society
Recently, Professor Jinglong Yang’s group reported a research result about novel lightweight ceramic foam. The result was awarded by the Best Paper Award of 2018 by Journal of the American Ceramic Society. Only 15 best papers were selected by this journal from more than 800 papers, which is the top one in ceramics in 2018. The award was presented at the 2019 Materials Science & Technology conference in Portland, Oregon, USA on October 3rd. The research by Prof. Jinglong Yang’s group demonstrates novel silica foams with an ultrahigh specific surface area constructed by hollow mesoporous silica spheres, showing important progress in the preparation field of novel lightweight ceramic foams.
Ceramic foam is a new type of structural and functional engineering material with excellent performance. It is commonly used for high temperature flue gas filters, aerospace components, catalyst carriers and thermal insulation materials. It also shows broad application prospects in the fields of machinery, electronic technology, metallurgy, chemical industry, environmental protection and energy conservation. Traditional ceramic foam has single closed pore structures and a low specific surface area, which makes the fluid difficult to penetrate. These disadvantages greatly limit its application in the adsorption, filtration, and catalysis fields. In recent years, Professor Jinlong Yang’s group has carried out a lot of research on the preparation and application of lightweight ceramic foams. They have achieved a number of important scientific research results.
The winning paper introduces a new method for preparing ceramic foams. Nano-sized silica hollow mesoporous spheres prepared by the emulsion method were used as the raw material. A foam material with a three-dimensional skeleton structure assembled from silica spheres was prepared by a particle-stabilized foam method. The ultra-stable foam prepared by this method can produce a three-dimensional foam material which is assembled from silica mesoporous hollow spheres after drying and sintering. The new material has the following hierarchical pore structure: uniform macropores evolved by bubbles, cavities of hollow microspheres, and radial mesopores (pore size of 2-3 nm) on the shell of hollow mesoporous silica spheres. Its specific surface area is as high as 1000-1700 m2/g, which is the highest specific surface area of all ceramic foams reported so far, even higher than that of inorganic aerogel materials. The ceramic foam with a hierarchical pore structure can satisfy many application fields by constructing the pore structure at different sizes.
It is expected to play a role in technical fields such as adsorption, filtration, drug sustained release, and catalyst carriers. The particle-stabilized foam process is inexpensive to produce, environmentally friendly and does not introduce impurities. It is therefore considered to be a promising process for foam structure forming.
Professor Jinlong Yang is the corresponding author of the paper. The research group's doctoral student Wenlong Huo is the first author of the paper.
