Shrinking and spring-back behaviour of methyltrimethoxysilane-based aerogels with different nanostructures during ambient pressure drying

Kurzfassung

In this study, we analyze the geometric changes occurring during ambient pressure drying of MTMS-based aerogels through video analysis. The aerogels are prepared with three distinct water-to-precursor molar ratios, which, under supercritical drying, yield three distinct nanostructures: nanoporous, co-continuous and particle aggregates. Here, we instead wash the gels with different solvents (protic, aprotic, polar and non-polar) to investigate how solvent choice affects capillary forces during APD, as well as the kinetics of both shrinkage and spring-back. Furthermore, we compare the structural properties of APD- and supercritically dried specimen by SEM analysis, providing microscopic insight into the resulting morphological differences.