Banerji Aditya, Jin Kailong, Mahanthappa Mahesh K, Bates Frank S, Ellison Christopher J
Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, United States.
Department of Chemical Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, United States.
ACS Macro Lett. 2021 Oct 19;10(10):1196-1203. doi: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.1c00456. Epub 2021 Sep 20.
We report a scalable melt blowing method for producing porous nonwoven fibers from model cocontinuous polystyrene/high-density polyethylene polymer blends. While conventional melt compounding of cocontinuous blends typically produces domain sizes ∼1-10 μm, melt blowing these blends into fibers reduces those dimensions up to 35-fold and generates an interpenetrating domain structure. Inclusion of ≤1 wt % of a block copolymer compatibilizer in these blends crucially enables access to smaller domain sizes in the fibers by minimizing thermodynamically-driven blend coarsening inherent to cocontinuous blends. Selective solvent extraction of the sacrificial polymer phase yielded a network of porous channels within the fibers. Fiber surfaces also exhibited pores that percolate into the fiber interior, signifying the continuous and interconnected nature of the final structure. Pore sizes as small as ∼100 nm were obtained, suggesting potential applications of these porous nonwovens that rely on their high surface areas, including various filtration modules.
我们报道了一种可扩展的熔喷方法，用于由模型共连续聚苯乙烯/高密度聚乙烯聚合物共混物制备多孔非织造纤维。虽然共连续共混物的传统熔融共混通常产生尺寸约为1-10μm的区域，但将这些共混物熔喷成纤维会使这些尺寸减小多达35倍，并产生互穿区域结构。在这些共混物中加入≤1 wt%的嵌段共聚物增容剂，通过最小化共连续共混物固有的热力学驱动的共混物粗化，关键地使得能够在纤维中获得更小的区域尺寸。对牺牲聚合物相进行选择性溶剂萃取，在纤维内产生了多孔通道网络。纤维表面也呈现出渗透到纤维内部的孔隙，这表明最终结构具有连续和相互连接的性质。获得了小至约100 nm的孔径，这表明这些多孔非织造材料因其高表面积而具有潜在应用，包括各种过滤组件。
