Nowadays there have been advances in applying electrospinning technologies to crystalline ceramic materials, such as silica and titanium multicomponent ceramics. TiO2 is one of the most widely used ceramic materials with applications ranging from skin protection to display technologies. Furthermore, there is great interest internationally in producing TiO2-based fibers due to the wide range of properties of this oxide. Similarly, SiO2 is the main building block for a majority of glasses and all silicates. The problem is that a majority of these manufacturing methods are energy intensive, use sacrificial organics to burn out to arrive at final structure, or they may have limited compositional range. Moreover, SiO2 and TiO2 are thermodynamically immiscible as illustrated in equilibrium phase diagrams. However, sol-gel processing offers the potential to systematically create designed materials that are less energy intensive to manufacture TiO2 and SiO2 to produce non-equilibrium and evenly distributed films and fibers. In present work, SiO2-TiO2 nanofibers were electrospun from tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) and titanium isopropoxide (TiP) sol solutions synthesized via sol-gel chemistry. A phase diagram was created summarizing the role of composition on electrospinnability of TEOS-TiP sol solutions. In this study, nanomposite fiber spinnability was examined without the addition of an organic polymer, oligomer, gelator, or binder. The range of TiO2 content in a SiO2-TiO2 nanocomposite fiber produced was successfully controlled from 0 mol% to 100 mol%. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (XEDS), thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA), and wide-angle x-ray diffraction (WAXD) were used to characterize the morphology, physical properties, and crystallinity of these fibers.

Morphology, electropinnability, and crystalline phase study of SiO2/TiO2 composite ceramic nanofibers using sol-gel chemistry

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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