Zuan‐Yu Chen, Shuai‐Chi Liu, Yuyue Wu, Cheng‐Fei Cao, Yang Li, Guodong Zhang, Guangming Chen, Jiefeng Gao, Pingan Song, Hao Wang, Kun Cao, Yiu‐Wing Mai, Long‐Cheng Tang
Silicone foam materials have attracted considerable interest in both academic and industrial fields owing to their non-petroleum source, wide temperature flexibility, chemical resistance, environmental stability, and electrical insulation. A recent increasing trend is to develop multifunctional silicone polymer foams and their composite materials for multiple emerging applications. However, an incisive and comparative overview of such an advanced silicone foam system is still lacking. This review reports a detailed summary of recent research progress on advanced silicone polymer foam composites for emerging applications. Besides, this review will systematically review and discuss various fabrication strategies, including physical templating, chemical foaming, and mixed foaming methods, and their structural features. Subsequently, physical and chemical properties of density, hydrophobicity, electrical conductivity, and flame retardancy, as well as mechanical properties, are compared and analyzed to better understand their structure-property interrelationships. Finally, the foams’ emerging applications based on evaluating some typical examples are also discussed. Overall, this review illustrates that silicone polymer foam composites are promising as one of the next-generation advanced polymer foam composite materials with a cost-effective fabrication process, superior hydrophobicity, environmental reliability, and new functionalities.