Compensation strategy for constructing high-performance aerogels using acrylamide-assisted vacuum drying and their use as water-induced electrical generators

Developing novel, energy-saving, and facile approaches to constructing high-performance aerogels is still challenging. Aerogels are most commonly produced by freeze-drying supercritical drying that require expensive specialty equipment or ambient lengthily of solvent exchange precursors. Here, we report a compensation strategy using acrylamide as an assisting solute enable the construction conductive polymer simple vacuum frozen solids aqueous poly(3,4-ethylene dioxythiophene)/poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT/PSS). In this approach, crystal sublimates slowly at elevated temperature (80 110 °C) maintain porous structure PEDOT/PSS in solid-state during water evaporation. By tuning weight ratios temperatures, were with low density (6.3–21.6 mg/cm3), high porosity (>99 %), shrinkage (5.3 %). Additionally, increases electrical conductivity three orders magnitude (from 0.01 81.1 S/m). Morphology physical properties further analyzed reveal aerogel formation enhancement mechanism. These then applied water-induced electric generators for green energy harvesting. The current work provides alternative simplified approach rapidly fabricating various nanomaterial-based aerogels, replacing slower more drying.