Biomimetic Aerogels from Microfibrillated Cellulose and Xyloglucan

Aerogels refer to a new class of materials holding air in their structure. They are highly porous solids having a large inner surface area. They are extremely light, low heat conductive, and high sound absorbent materials. Therefore, aerogels have excellent performance in applications such as heat insulators, particle filters, particle trappers, and catalyst carriers 1 . Aerogels are prepared starting from gels by carefully replacing the liquid by air while the structure is maintained. This is mostly done by supercritical drying or freeze drying. Most of the aerogels have the drawback of being brittle, and this considerably limits their applications, and only a few non brittle aerogels could be found in the literature 2-4 .