Issue 9, 2018, Issue in Progress

Nanofibers with diameter below one nanometer from electrospinning

Abstract

Sub-nanometer materials have received wide attention due to their unique properties in recent years. Most studies focus on the preparation and properties investigation of the inorganic sub-nanometer materials, while there are few reports on organic especially polymeric sub-nanometer materials such as sub-nanometer fiber due to the obstacles with respect to fabricating such small nanofibers. In this work we prepare PAA nanofibers with diameters ranging from hundreds of nanometers down to sub-nanometer via electrospinning from a polyamic acid (PAA) with ultrahigh molecular weight. The morphologies and size of the electrospun ultrathin nanofibers are characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). AFM images combined with theoretic calculations show that sub-nanometer fiber of approximate 0.17–0.63 nm only containing one molecular chain was generated via electrospinning from ultra-dilute PAA solutions for the first time. These quite small sub-nanometer fibers would open a new area of electrospinning and provide further explorations on the production and application of electrospun sub-nanometer fibers with single molecular chains.

Graphical abstract: Nanofibers with diameter below one nanometer from electrospinning

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
19 Dec 2017
Accepted
20 Jan 2018
First published
26 Jan 2018
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

RSC Adv., 2018,8, 4794-4802

Nanofibers with diameter below one nanometer from electrospinning

S. Jian, J. Zhu, S. Jiang, S. Chen, H. Fang, Y. Song, G. Duan, Y. Zhang and H. Hou, RSC Adv., 2018, 8, 4794 DOI: 10.1039/C7RA13444D

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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