Nanofibers from water-extractable melt-blown immiscible polymer blends

Zaifei Wang, Xiaotun Liu, Christopher W. Macosko, Frank S. Bates

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

28 Scopus citations

Abstract

Nanofibers were prepared from water-extractable melt-blown immiscible polymer blends containing a commercial sulfopolyester (SP) as the sacrificial phase. Application of the water-dispersible SP eliminates issues associated with organic solvents, providing a facile, economic, and environment-friendly approach to high throughput fabrication of melt-blown nanofibers with an average diameter as small as 66 nm. Moreover, this approach offers a new route to prepare multilayer melt-blown nano-/micro-fiber composites. We demonstrate the fabrication of porous double-layer melt-blown PBT nano-/micro-fiber composites by tuning the collection time of the melt-blown SP/PBT blend fibers. Such materials are potentially useful for filtration media.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)269-273
Number of pages5
JournalPolymer
Volume101
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 28 2016

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors gratefully acknowledge Cummins Filtration for financial support. Sulfopolyester was kindly provided by Dr. Jeff Galloway at the Eastman Chemical Company. SEM was carried out in the Characterization Facility, University of Minnesota, which receives partial support from the National Science Foundation through the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (NSF-MRSEC) program.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd

Keywords

  • Melt-blown
  • Nanofibers
  • Water-extractable blends

How much support was provided by MRSEC?

  • Shared

Reporting period for MRSEC

  • Period 3

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