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Engineering highly porous SiC foams with interconnected cellular architecture and satisfactory compressive strength for the practical applications remains a challenging task. In the current work, SiC foams bonded by in-situ formed mullite phase were fabricated via polyurethane foaming using boehmite sol-coated SiC powder as the raw material. The strategy in the current work endowed the resultant products with ultrahigh porosity, interconnected pore structure, and a robust mullite bonding phase among the SiC particles. The resulting products with this cellular architecture possessed a high porosity level of 88.5% and maintained a robust compressive strength of 2.56 MPa. Our results showed that as-prepared products are promising for practical applications in the filtration, adsorption and catalytic areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering mechanically robust ZrO2 foams with three‐dimensional (3D) reticular architecture and high porosity is extremely challenging. In current work, we presented an approach for constructing such cellular ceramics via a combined polyurethane foaming and chemical grafting method. Ester functional groups were chemically grafted on the ZrO2 powder surface to enhance its dispersibility. This approach caused the micron‐sized windows to assemble onto the cell wall of porous framework, contributing to 3D interconnected reticular architecture. The resulting products with such cellular architecture possessed a high porosity level of 89.2% and maintained an ultrahigh compressive strength of 8.5 MPa. Our results open up new opportunities for fabricating high‐performance ZrO2 foams toward practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]