Environment head the list of top global issues facing society for the next 50 years. Nanotechnology respond to these challenges by the designing and fabricating functional nanofibers optimized to energy and environmental applications. The route towards such nano-objects is based primarily on electrospinning: a highly versatile method that allows the fabrication of continuous fibers with diameters down to a few nanometers. This report presents an overview of this technique, with focus on the progress achieved by us in recent years. The electrospinning method have been applied to natural polymers, synthetic polymers, ceramics and carbon. Fibers with complex architectures, such as porous fibers, cable-like fibers, core-shell fibers, alignment fibers, bio-inspired nanofibers, and 2-demensional nanofibers/nets, can be produced by special electrospinning methods. The diverse properties of these nanofibers, based on different physical, chemical, optical, or biological behavior, mean they are of interest for different applications ranging from air filtration, liquid filtration, self cleaning, quartz crystal microbalance-based sensors, colorimetric sensors, oil spill clean-up, adsorbents and so on, which have open up the possibility of moving beyond our current alternative to ensure sustainable environment for the future.

Electrospun nanofibers: Solving global environmental issues

247th National Meeting (2014)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.