Industrial Scale Sea‐Island Melt‐Spun Continuous Ultrafine Fibers for Highly Comfortable Insulated Aerogel Felt Clothing

Abstract

Aerogels are most attractive for thermal clothing. However, mechanical fragility and structural instability restrict their practical applications. These issues are overcome by developing industrial scale sea-island melt-spun ultrafine fibers with large and uniform length-to-diameter as building blocks, which are assembled into aerogel felts with corrugated lamellar structure through freeze-shaping technology. These aerogels possess excellent mechanical properties to meet fabric elasticity and comfort needs, including super-flexibility (25% tensile strain, 95% compression, 180° bending performance) and fatigue resistance of over 10,000 cycles. The aerogels are also self-cleaning, waterproof, breathable, and flame-retardant, making them suitable for application requirements in extreme environments. Moreover, the obtained aerogel felt clothing exhibits excellent thermal insulation properties close to that of dry air, and is only one-third as thick as down clothing with similar insulating properties. Expanding sea-island melt-spun fiber to construct aerogel in this strategy provides scalable potential for developing multifunctional insulating aerogel clothing.