Porous membranes have a long history of research and applications, and their operations have been consolidated for a wide range of uses in the fields of chemical separation, water treatment, food production, catalysis, and energy storage and conversion. Regardless of their significance in the above areas, they still suffer from compromise that arise due to achieving a balance between the selectivity and permeability, fouling issues, and lack of adaptability to meet versatile and aggressive environments. Liquid-based porous membranes have come to the fore as a new alternative to avert these challenges with significant advantages in diffusive, dynamic, antifouling, omniphobic, self-healing, and adaptive properties. Although rapidly progressing, there is a still lack of a comprehensive review that specifically addresses these members of the membrane family, and more importantly, the confusions occurring among myriad liquid-based porous membranes that have impeded their applications in potential uses. With this goal, this tutorial review will give a new unifying view on the state-of-the-art progress of liquid-based porous membranes, including the historical timeline, interfacial behavior, materials design, materials chemistry, mass transport mechanism, fluid behavior, and emerging applications. Anatomizing the basic aspects such as chemical compatibility and mutual interplays between the porous matrix and the infused functional liquid, and the varied transport mechanisms, we hope to dissolve the complexities of liquid-based porous membranes for more audience. Emergent applications such as gas separation, extraction, smart gating systems, multiphase separation, and chemical detection are also touched upon, inspiring frontier researches in interfacial chemistry, material chemistry, fluid mechanics, membrane science, chemical engineering, etc.

Aerogel fibers, combining the nanoporous characteristics of aerogels with the slenderness of fibers, have emerged as a rising star in nanoscale materials science. However, endowing nanoporous aerogel fibers with good strength and high toughness remains elusive due to their high porosity and fragile mechanics. To address this challenge, this paper reports supertough aerogel fibers (SAFs) initially started from ionic-liquid-dissociated cellulose via wet-spinning and supercritical drying in sequence. The supertough nanoporous aerogel fibers assembled with cellulose nanofibers exhibit a high specific surface area (372 m²/g), good mechanical strength (30 MPa), and large elongation (107%). Benefiting from their high strength and elongation, the resultant cellulose nanoporous aerogel fibers show ultrahigh toughness up to 21.85 MJ/m³, much outperforming the known aerogel materials in the literature. Moreover, the toughness of this nanoporous aerogel fiber is 7.4 times higher than that of human knee ligaments, and its specific toughness is comparable to that of commonly used solid polyester fibers. In addition, we also verified the weavability, desirable thermal insulation performance, and supertoughness to resist the transient impact of SAFs. The long-sought strategy to simultaneously resolve the strength and toughness of nanoporous aerogel fibers, in combination with the biodegradable nature of the cellulose, provides multifaceted opportunities for broad potential applications, including lightweight wearable textiles and beyond.

We report a new membrane system showing dynamic controllable multiphase transport and separation under steady-state pressure.

Aerogels, as famous lightweight and porous nanomaterials, have attracted considerable attention in various emerging fields in recent decades, however, both low density and weak mechanical performance make their configuration-editing capability challenging. Inspired by folk arts, herein we establish a highly efficient twice-coagulated (TC) strategy to fabricate configuration-editable tough aerogels enabled by transformable gel precursors. As a proof of concept, aramid nanofibers (ANFs) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) are selected as the main components of aerogel, among which PVA forms a flexible configuration-editing gel network in the first coagulation process, and ANF forms a configuration-locking gel network in the second coagulation process. TC strategy guarantees the resulting aerogels with both high toughness and feasible configuration editing capability individually or simultaneously. Altogether, the resulting tough aerogels with special configuration through soft to hard modulation provide great opportunities to break through the performance limits of the aerogels and expand application areas of aerogels.

Encapsulated aerogel fibers offer thermal insulation, breathability, and strength