Inorganic aerogels have exhibited many superior characteristics with extensive applications, but are still plagued by a nearly century-old tradeoff between their mechanical and thermal properties. When reducing thermal conductivity by ultralow density, inorganic aerogels generally suffer from large fragility due to their brittle nature or weak joint crosslinking, while enhancing the mechanical robustness by material design and structural engineering, they easily sacrifice thermal insulation and stability. Here, we report a chemically bonded multi-nanolayer design and synthesis of a graphene/amorphous boron nitride aerogel to address this typical tradeoff to further enhance mechanical and thermal properties. Attributed to the chemically bonded interface and coupled toughening effect, our aerogels display a low density of 0.8 mg cm⁻³ with ultrahigh flexibility (elastic compressive strain up to 99% and bending strain up to 90%), and exceptional thermostability (strength degradation <3% after sharp thermal shocks), as well as the lowest thermal conductivities in a vacuum (only 1.57 mW m⁻¹ K⁻¹ at room temperature and 10.39 mW m⁻¹ K⁻¹ at 500°C) among solid materials to date. This unique combination of mechanical and thermal properties offers an attractive material system for thermal superinsulation at extreme conditions.

In this paper, a two-dimensional semi-analytical method is developed for the mechanical behavior analysis of multilayered solids subjected to surface contact loading, which is indispensable for realizing an optimized tribological performance from the mechanical behavior point of view. Firstly, the explicit analytical frequency response functions of the multilayered solid are derived in a recursive form by analytically solving a system of linear equations established according to the boundary conditions and the interface continuous conditions. Then, the two-dimensional elastic field solution in the subsurface of multilayered solids in the space domain is converted from its corresponding frequency response functions by employing a numerical conversion method based on the inverse fast Fourier transformation. The present method is validated by comparing with the solution given by other methods. Lastly, the stress analysis of multilayered coatings with various structure layouts and various layer number of the multilayers were performed with the present method.

In this paper, interfacial stress analysis for a brittle coating/ductile substrate system, which is involved in a sliding contact with a rigid ball, is presented. By combining interface mechanics theory and the image point method, stress and displacement responses within a coated material for normal load, tangential load, and thermal load are obtained; further, the Green’s functions are established. The effects of coating thickness, friction coefficient, and a coating’s thermoelastic properties on the interfacial shear stress, τ_xz, and transverse stress, σ_xx, distributions are discussed in detail. A phenomenon, where interfacial shear stress tends to be relieved by frictional heating, is found in the case of a coating material’s thermal expansion coefficient being less than a substrate material’s thermal expansion coefficient. Additionally, numerical results show that distribution of interfacial stress can be altered and, therefore, interfacial damage can be modified by adjusting a coating’s structural parameters and thermoelastic properties.

We investigated the delamination behaviour of diamond-like carbon films on silicon nitride (Si₃N₄) substrates, considering the effect of the substrates surface roughness. The damage evolution at the film/substrate interface during indentation was simulated using a cohesive zone model, and the interfacial stress and energy release were determined. We discuss the influence of asperity size, thickness and Young's modulus of the films. The results show that the interfacial roughness hastens the onset of interfacial damage but delays the progression of film delamination owing to the effect of mechanical interlocking. The asperity size and film thickness also strong influence the delamination of diamond-like carbon films.