Manipulation And Formation Mechanism Of Silica One-dimensionalperiodic Structures By Electrospinning

For their unique properties and versatile applications, one-dimensional structures, such as fibers, belts, tubes et al. have attracted considerable attention and several methods for their fabrication have been demonstrated and developed in recent years. Electrospinning, based on strong mutual electrical forces, provides a highly effective way to process solutions into continuous one-dimensional structures with diameters ranging from a few nanometers to several micrometers. Because of the requirements on the viscoelastic behavior of a solution, this technique is widely used to deal with organic polymers with high molecular weights. Efforts have been made to fabricate ceramic fibers based on conventional sol–gel precursor solutions. Wettability is an important feature of materials, as it plays a critical role in many practical applications. The advantages of electrospinning are that it enables the fabrication of functional fibers with controllable wetting behaviour. Researchers have described two different strategies to make hierarchically roughened superhydrophobic electrospun nonwovenmats by decorating micrometer-scale fibers with nanometer-scale pores or particles. The sol–gel process and electrospinning were used to fabricate a series of silica/Nafion electrospun hybrid products with no aggregation of the inorganic component. The excellent flexibility of the as-obtained silica/Nafion non-woven membrane and a single hybrid fiber was demonstrated and compared with the brittleness of pure electrospun silica membrane. The difference in wettability between the electrospun silica/Nafion hybrid product and bulk aqueous sol could be caused by the molecular orientation of Nafion during the electrospinning process. The hydrophobic behaviour, improved mechanical performance and good thermal stability made the silica/Nafion hybrid membrane a good candidate for oil–water separation. One-dimensional periodic structures still formed in silica/Nafion hybrid products with a lower Nafion content, although they disappeared completely at a higher Nafion content. The controllable wetting behaviors were realized by modifying the functional groups on the backbone and one-dimensional periodic structures were directly fabricated by using collector substrates with different electrical conductivity.These results demonstrated the utility of roller electrospinning in the fabrication of controllable one-dimensional periodic structures. In the experiment investigation was required to elucidate mechanistic details and to develop an appropriate model in order to reveal the intrinsic physics behind the long-range one-dimensional periodicstructure. Herein, silica and polymeric system were electrospun onto collector substrates with different electrical conductivity, and a detailed investigation into the dependence of the morphology of the product on various parameters was conducted. Based on the experimental results, an energy transformation model was proposed.In this paper, multifunctional superhydrophobic fabrics were produced successfully by creating hierarchical electrospun fibrousstructures from methyltriethoxysilane with a low surface energy.