Electrospun Nanofibers with Tunable Electrical Conductivity

Electrospinning is a convenient method to produce nanofibers with controlled diameters on the order of tens to hundreds of nanometers. The resulting nonwoven fiber mats are lightweight, highly porous, and have high specific surface areas around 1 to 100 m/g. Combined with the high electrical conductivity of intrinsically conductive polymers, conductive electrospun fiber mats are promising for a variety of applications, such as multifunctional textiles, resistancebased sensors, flexible reversibly hydrophobic surfaces, organic photovoltaics, scaffolds for tissue engineering, and conductive substrates for surface functionalization and modification. Intrinsically conductive polymers, such as polyaniline (PAni), however, are relatively hard to process compared to most other polymers. They have fairly rigid backbones due to the high aromaticity, and are usually available only in relatively low molecular weight forms, so that the elasticity of their solutions is insufficient for it to be electrospun directly into fibers. Considerable amount of recent work has been reported trying to make electrospun polymeric nanofibers with intrinsically conductive polymers or composites. However, a large fraction of the work only showed the morphology and did not characterize the actual performance of these fibers, nor did they test the variability of the fibers and mats from a wide range of processing conditions and resulting structures. Therefore, this thesis aims to make a comprehensive study of the electrical tunability of electrospun fibers with intrinsically conductive polymers and its composites, to establish a clear processing-structure-property relationship for these fibers and fiber mats, and to test the resultant fibers with the targeted applications such as gas sensing.