Facile synthesis route for MoS2-polyvinylpyrrolidone aerogels

•A facile route for MoS2-PVP aerogels by direct frozen-drying was reported.•PVP plays a significant role in the modification of MoS2 and formation of aerogels.•The density of aerogels can be tuned through changing the concentrations of precursors.•This route can be applied to prepare aerogels from many 1D or 2D materials.

Three-dimensional (3D) aerogels with low density, high porosity and large surface area have attracted increasing attention and exhibit numerous applications. However, the material types of aerogels are still very limited. Herein, we report a facile synthesis route to prepare MoS2-polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) aerogels via direct frozen-drying from primitive solution with PVP, which plays a key role to obtain aerogels. The good wettability both on water and oil of PVP makes it easily cover on the surface of MoS2 nanosheets, which promotes the sheets connection with each other. The density of the obtained MoS2-PVP aerogels can be tuned from 9.2 to 33.8 mg/cm3 via simply changing the concentrations of the precursors. Importantly, our current approach has been successfully applied to prepare other 2D or 1D material-PVP aerogels, taking boron nitride-PVP and carbon nanotubes-PVP aerogels as examples.

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