Controlling Microstructure of Metal and Polymer Aerogels via Advanced Templating Approaches

Aerogels are highly-porous, nanostructured materials with great potential in advanced technologies including energy storage, (electro)catalysis, and sensing. This PhD studentship will develop new materials chemistry approaches to engineer aerogels with a new level of micro-structural control, currently not available through existing methodologies. To this end, the project will exploit recent advances in microfluidics and nanocarbon science to improve overall synthetic control in the fabrication of low-density metal and polymer aerogels. The resulting new aerogel materials will be characterized using advanced techniques, with focus on state-of-the-art 3D characterization of aerogel microstructure via electron microscopy and X-ray tomography. The most promising aerogel materials will be tested as (electro)catalysts in sustainability-related model reactions (such as electrocatalytic CO2 reduction) in order to study fundamental structure-function relationships.
The PhD project will be run in close collaboration with a commercial partner who is co-funding the research. The PhD project will also make use of state-of-the-art materials characterization laboratories at the Bragg Centre for Materials Research at Leeds (electron microscopy and spectroscopy) and the Henry-Royce Institute (X-ray CT).