2025 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit

Symposium SF01-Aerogels and Aerogel-Inspired Materials

Aerogels are a diverse class of nanoporous, nanostructured materials that exhibit a broad array of extreme and unusual materials properties, often simultaneously in the same material envelope. Aerogels bring the magic of nanotechnology to the macroscopic scale, enabling advanced applications in energy storage and collection, environmental remediation, energy efficiency, electronics and communications, space exploration, particle physics, and more. The field of aerogels has exploded over the past decade and is inspiring a diversity of new pore-solid architected materials of an ever-increasing range of substances, geometries, and functionality. The community is rapidly growing, new use cases are continually being reported, and commercialization of aerogels is undergoing rapid development. Age-old limitations of diffusion-mediated processes such as drying, solvent exchange, and gelation are falling away. The intersection of aerogels with low-dimensional objects, engineered carbons, biopolymers, multielectron physics, interfacial phenomena, thin films, and additive manufacturing are creating new materials possibilities. This symposium will provide a forum for emerging and established research groups and industrial players to crosspollinate ideas and capabilities in this rapidly changing and growing field.

Topics will include:

New compositions and pore structures for aerogels and aerogel-like materials
High-performance synthetic polymer and biopolymer aerogels
Modelling and simulation of aerogels
Electroosmosis, supercritical suction and spillage, high-temperature supercritical drying, freeze casting, continuous manufacturing, never-wet processes, and other diffusion-busting techniques
Aerogel thin films and their applications
Aerogel composites and nanocomposites
Energy storage, capture, and conversion with aerogels
Aerogels in high-energy physics, fusion, and space exploration
Characterization of mechanical, microstructural, acoustic, electromagnetic, and other properties of aerogels
Commercial applications of aerogels in buildings, transportation, batteries, electronics, apparel, the arts, and beyond
Additive manufacturing and other shape control techniques for nanoporous materials
Aerogel architectures of low-dimensional materials such as MXenes, engineered nanocarbons, semiconductors, and binary compounds
Conductive, photocatalytic, energetic, superelastic, and other special-functionality aerogels
Pharmaceutical and food science applications of aerogels
Sustainability and environmental impact of aerogel production

Invited Speakers:

Indika Arachchige (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA)
F. John Burpo (U.S. Military Academy at West Point, USA)
Alexander Eychmueller (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)
Jakub Gac (Warsaw University of Technology, Poland)
George Hasegawa (Nagoya University, Japan)
Matthew Herman (Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA)
Petra Herman (University of Debrecen, Hungary)
Marc Hodes (Tufts University, USA)
Saiful Islam (Jackson State University, USA)
Nicholas Leventis (Aspen Aerogels, Inc., USA)
Pradip Maji (Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India)
Tom McCarthy (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
Patricia Mcneil (Westwood Aerogel, USA)
Natalia Menshutina (Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia, Russian Federation)
Beatriz Merillas (University of Valladolid, Spain)
Debra Rolison (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, USA)
Tsuguyuki Saito (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
Irina Smirnova (Technische Universität Hamburg, Germany)
Makoto Tabata (Chiba University, Japan)
Stephanie Vivod (NASA Glenn Research Center, USA)
Kyle Wilke (AeroShield, USA)
Shanyu Zhao (Empa—Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Switzerland)
Guoqing Zu (Tongji University, China)