Assembling hollow carbon sphere-graphene polylithic aerogels for thermoelectric cells

Abstract Aerogels are highly porous bulk materials assembled chemically or physically with various nanoscale building blocks and thus hold promise for numerous applications including energy storage and conversion. Assembling of hollow or porous particles with the diameter larger than 100 nm into hierarchically porous aerogels is efficient but challenging for achieving a high specific surface of aerogel. In this regard, submicron-sized carbon spheres with hollow cores and microporous shells are assembled into bulk aerogels, for the first time, in the presence of two-dimensional graphene sheets as special cross-linkers. The resulting bead-to-sheet polylithic aerogels show ultra-low density (51–67 mg cm −3 ), high conductivity (263–695 S m −1 ) and high specific surface area (569–609 m 2  g −1 ). An application of thermocells is demonstrated with maximum output power of 1.05 W m −2 and maximum energy conversion efficiency of 1.4% relative to Carnot engine, outperforming the current simple U-shaped thermocells reported elsewhere.