Functional Applications of Electrospun Nanofibers

With the rapid development of nanoscience and nanotechnology over the last two decades, great progress has been made not only in preparation and characterization of nanomaterials, but also in their functional applications. As an important one-dimensional nanomaterial, nanofibers have extremely high specific surface area because of their small diameters, and nanofiber membranes are highly porous with excellent pore interconnectivity. These unique characteristics plus the functionalities from the polymers themselves impart nanofibers with many desirable properties for advanced applications. Several methods have been developed to fabricate nanofibers, such as template (Ikegame et al., 2003), self-assembly (Hong et al., 2003), phase separation (Ma and Zhang, 1999), meltblowing (Ellison et al., 2007) and electrospinning (Doshi and Reneker, 1995, Lin et al., 2004, Lin et al., 2005a, Fang et al., 2007, Xue et al., 2009, Fang et al., 2010). Electrospinning has been regarded as the most promising approach to produce continuous nanofibers on a large scale and the fiber diameter can be adjusted from nanometers to micrometers (Li and Xia, 2004b).