Chemical treatments for improving adhesion between electrospun nanofibers and fabrics

Abstract

Nanofiber‐coated fabrics have potential uses in filters and protective clothing. One major challenge is to ensure good adhesion of nanofibers to the fabrics achieving satisfactory durability against abrasion for practical use. This work is aimed to study adhesion mechanisms and their improvement between nanofibers and textile substrates; to achieve this goal cotton fabrics were treated with an alkali solution, while nylon fabrics were treated with ethanol. Adhesion of polyamide‐6 electrospun nanofiber layer to fabrics was evaluated by means of a peeling test. Treated fabrics showed improved bonding towards nanofibers: adhesion energy was ∼0.58 J m−2 for both untreated fabrics, and after treatments increased to 0.93 and 0.86 J m−2 for cotton and nylon ones, respectively. Optical observations revealed that nanofibers deposited on fabrics are mainly linked to external protruding fibers (i.e., fabric hairiness). Therefore, surface hairiness seems to be the critical factor limiting adhesion. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2014, 131, 39766.

Electromagnetic Interference Shield of Highly Thermal-Conducting, Light-Weight, and Flexible Electrospun Nylon 66 Nanofiber-Silver Multi-Layer Film

“…Under these conditions, a 20-μm-thick electrospun mat was fabricated with 4 mL of nylon 66 solution. Afterward, the electrospun mats were ethanol-treated in order to improve adhesion between the mats because they inherently repulse each other [ 45 ]. Each electrospun mat was immersed in ethanol (80 v / v ) on a hot plate, of which the temperature was maintained at 70 °C for an hour.…”

“…Because of such a lack of adhesion energy on the NFs, the as-spun mats adhered poorly to each other in spite of being hot-pressed. In a previous study [45], an aqueous ethanol solution was used to disorder the methylene groups of the nylon 66 NFs, resulting in increases in the adhesion energy and hydrophilicity of the NFs without changing their surface geometry. Therefore, ethanol-treatment was performed on the electrospun mats before the hot-pressing process.…”

Defect minimization and feature control in electrospinning through design of experiments

“…During electrospinning, temperature and humidity were recorded with an Escort iLog RH data logger (Eclo, Portugal) every minute. Nanofibers were collected for for each sample; this duration is enough to get a proper electrospun sheet and to derive information about the process …”

Enhanced Adhesion of Electrospun Polycaprolactone Nanofibers to Plasma-Modified Polypropylene Fabric

“…However, spunbond polypropylene (PP) textile, often used as the support and collector during the electrospinning of NFs, is hydrophobic, which can prevent nanofibers from adhering. Adhesion of NFs to textile support can be improved chemically [ 24 ] or thermally [ 25 ], but plasma processing of material surfaces has started to attract attention in recent years. Plasma technology for surface modifications has many advantages compared to wet chemical treatments, such as low toxicity, short one-step easily tunable fabrication, substrate independence, and, if required, a negligible degradation of the original material.…”