Bioinspired Manufacturing of Aerogels with Precisely Manipulated Surface Microstructure through Controlled Local Temperature Gradients.

The freeze casting process has been widely used for fabricating aerogels due to its versatile and environmentally friendly nature. This process offers a variety of tools to tailor the entire micropore morphology of the final product in a monolithic fashion through manipulation of the freezing kinetics and precursor suspension chemistry. However, aerogels with nonmonolithic micropore morphologies, having pores of various sizes located in certain regions of the aerogels, are highly desired by certain applications such as controlled drug-delivery, bone tissue engineering, extracellular simulation, selective liquid sorption, immobilized catalysts, and separators.