Prof. Yang Jinlong and his team from the School of Materials Science and Engineering of Tsinghua University won the 2018 Best Paper Award of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society

Prof. Yang Jinlong's team at the School of Materials Science and Engineering of Tsinghua University has been awarded the 2018 Best Paper Award by the Journal of the American Ceramic Society for its research on a new lightweight foam Ceramic material. The award is awarded to the 15 best papers selected by the American Ceramic Society from more than 800 papers published in 2018 in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society, a leading journal in the field of ceramics. The awards were presented at the 2019 International Conference on Materials Science & Technology in Portland, Oregon, USA, on October 3.Prof. Yang Jinlong and his team won the paper "Silica Foams with Ultra-Large Specific Surface Area Structured by Hollow Microspheres" Mesoporous Silica Spheres described the important progress made by the team in the field of new lightweight foam ceramic materials, and proposed a new method to prepare ultra-high specific surface area and high porosity foam materials.

William G. Fanrenholtz, editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society, awarded the team a certificate of honor for the best paper.

Certificate of Honor (left) and Medal (right) of "Best Paper" from the American Ceramic Society.

Foam ceramic material is a new engineering material with excellent performance, structure and function integration. It is often used in high temperature flue gas filter, aerospace and spacecraft components, catalyst carrier, heat insulation materials and other fields. In machinery, electronic technology, metallurgy, chemical industry, environmental protection, energy saving and other fields have a wide range of application prospects. Traditional foam ceramic materials have a single pore structure, low specific surface area, and closed pore wall structure makes it difficult for fluid to penetrate and diffuse, which greatly limits its applications in adsorption, filtration, catalysis and other fields. In recent years, Professor Yang Jinlong's team has carried out a lot of research work on the preparation and application of lightweight foam ceramic materials, and achieved a number of important scientific research achievements.

The winning paper introduces a new method for the preparation of foam ceramics. Using nanometer silica hollow mesopores prepared by emulsion method as raw material, the foam material with three-dimensional skeleton structure assembled by microspheres was prepared by particle stabilized foam method. After drying and sintering, a three-dimensional foam material with complete morphology can be obtained by assembling mesoporous hollow spheres of silicon oxide. The new material has the following multi-stage pore structure: a large uniform pore formed by the evolution of bubbles; The cavity of a hollow microsphere; Radiate mesopores (aperture 2 -- 3nm) in the hollow mesoporous spherical shell of silicon oxide. The specific surface area of this material is as high as 1000-1700m2/g, which is the highest among all foam ceramic materials reported at present, and even higher than that of inorganic aerogel materials. This kind of foam material with multi-level pore structure can meet more application fields by building pore structure in different sizes, and is expected to play a role in adsorption, filtration, drug release, catalyst carrier and other technical fields. This kind of particle stabilized foam method has the advantages of low cost, environmental friendliness, and no impurity, so it is considered to be a promising method for foam structure forming.

The abstract of this winning paper is illustrated.

Professor Yang Jinlong is the corresponding author of this paper, and doctoral student Huo Wenlong is the first author of this paper.