An Environmentally Friendly Adsorbent Aerogel with Outstanding Mechanical Performance

As one of the promising environmentally friendly bio-materials, polysaccharide-based aerogels have a high potential for use in environmental engineering, especially for the absorption of water pollutants. However, the poor mechanical properties have seriously restricted their practical applications. Herein, we successfully fabricated a new kind of CAR/PAm double network aerogel containing GO. The aerogel demonstrated excellent compressive strength (25.902 MPa), good toughness, resilience, and shape recovery, simultaneously. This could be mainly explained in terms of synergistic effects of newly formed reversible interactions induced by the formation of interpenetrating network structure, as well as the bridging effect of the GO between the networks. Moreover, the adsorption experiments showed that the nanocomposite double network aerogel could effectively remove cationic and anionic dyes.