Inspired by the structure of polar bear hair, a team of Chinese scientists has developed a lightweight, hydrophobic, and thermally insulating material with a cavity structure. It is expected to meet the special needs of materials in the aerospace and other fields in the future.
Unlike human or other mammal hair, polar bear hair is hollow. This structure prevents the amount of heat from spreading from the surface of the polar bear's skin to the surrounding low-temperature environment.
A team of Chinese scientists published a paper in the American Journal of Chemistry on the 6th and said that they were inspired to artificially synthesize a hollow carbon tube aerogel. The inner diameter of the hollow carbon tube is only 35 nanometers, which is much smaller than the average free path of air (75 nanometers), which means that the air in the tube hardly transfers heat, so the material has good thermal insulation properties. In addition, the three-dimensional network structure of this carbon tube aerogel also makes it super elastic, and it can maintain the structural integrity even after 1 million times of compression at 30% strain.
Corresponding author Yu Shuhong, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, said that after long-term evolution, polar bear hair with a cavity structure can reduce heat loss in cold and humid environments, and is an ideal model for synthetic thermal insulation materials. The research team will next explore manufacturing this material on a larger scale and achieving mass production, promoting its application in aerospace and other fields.