A robust silk fibroin/graphene oxide aerogel fiber for the radiative heating textiles.

Aerogel fibers with ultra-high porosity and ultra-low density are the promising candidate used for the personal thermal management to reduce the energy waste of heating the entire room, and play important roles in saving the energy waste. However, aerogel fibers generally suffer from poor mechanical properties and complicated preparation processes. Herein, we demonstrate a hierarchically porous and continuous silk fibroin/Graphene oxide aerogel fibers (SF/GO) with high strength, excellent radiative heating performance and thermal insulation performance through coaxial wet spinning and freeze drying. The hollow CA/PAA fibers prepared via coaxial wet spinning process have multiscale porous structures, which not only benefits for the formation of SF/GO aerogel core, but also helps to improve the mechanical strength of aerogel fibers. Moreover, the prepared aerogel fibers show the comparable porosity and mechanical properties with the hollow CA/PAA fibers. More importantly, GO can dramatically improve the infrared radiative heating properties, and the surface temperature is increased by 2.6 ℃ after exposure in the infrared radiation for 30 s, greatly higher than the hollow fiber and SF aerogel fibers. Furthermore, the integration of hierarchically porous hollow fiber and SF/GO aerogel prevents the thermal convection, decreases the thermal conduction, and suppresses the thermal radiation, rendering the SF/GO aerogel fiber with excellent thermal insulation performances. This work may shed light the heat transfer mechanism of the microenvironment between the human body and textiles and pave the way for the fabrication of high-performance aerogel fibers used for the personal thermal management.