Construction of continuous hollow silica aerogel fibers with hierarchical pores and excellent adsorption performance

Porous materials with the high specific surface area are required in the adsorption, filtration, catalysis and sensing fields. When such materials are translated into fibers, their working is predicted to be raised owing to the vast advantages of fiber materials such as enhanced surface areas. However, it remains a challenge to fabricate silica aerogel fibers continuously because of their long phase transformation time and fragile network skeletons. Herein, silica aerogel fibers with hierarchical pores and hollow structure were successfully fabricated via the facile and scalable wet reaction spinning method for the first time. These fibers exhibited a high specific surface area and interconnected pores. More still, they display a higher absorption rate than most the known traditional adsorbents.