Chapter 12: Tuning Microscopic and Mechanical Properties of Bio-based Aerogels

Natural resources are abundant in numerous forms such as animals, plants, bacteria, and other organisms. Proteins and polysaccharides that can be recovered from natural resources and have good biocompatibility have found many promising high value applications, such as in the tailoring of aerogels for bioactive scaffolds in biomedical treatments. To meet the requirements of an extracellular matrix, it is particularly important to tune the microscopic properties and mechanical characteristics of the aerogels. In this chapter, different available approaches to control those properties of aerogels will be elaborated. How the controlling approaches influence the properties of aerogels will also be discussed. However, application performance of the aerogels in biomedical treatments, although important, is not the focus of the current chapter.