Electrospun metallic nanowires: Synthesis, characterization, and applications

Abstract

Metals are known to have unique thermal, mechanical, electrical, and catalytic properties. On the other hand, metallic nanowires are promising materials for variety of applications such as transparent conductive film for photovoltaic devices, electrodes for batteries, as well as nano-reinforcement for composite materials. Whereas varieties of methods have been explored to synthesize metal nanowires with different characteristics, electrospinning has also been found to be successful for that purpose. Even though electrospinning of polymeric nanofibers is a well-established field, there are several challenges that need to be overcome to use the electrospinning technique for the fabrication of metallic nanowires. These challenges are mainly related to the multi-steps fabrication process and its relation to the structure evolution of the nanowires. In addition to reviewing the literature, this article identifies promising avenues for further research in this area with particular emphasis on the applications that nonwoven metal wires confined in a nano-scale can open.

An Overview of One-Dimensional Metal Nanostructures for Electrocatalysis

“…Electrospinning is a simple and versatile method for the fabrication of 1D nanomaterials in a continuous process at a long length scale, which has been applied for synthesizing metallic nanowires and nanotubes [131,132]. Table 7 shows several works on the electrospinning methods for synthesizing 1D metal electrocatalysts.…”

Emerging Novel Metal Electrodes for Photovoltaic Applications

“…[292][293][294][295][296] However, the direct patterning of metal mesh through electrospinning technique should be optimized on each step for the formation of high-quality metal mesh, which otherwise will be comprised of metal wires with low aspect ratio and low conductive. [297] Meanwhile, the use of the polymer fiber network as support template for the deposition of metal film through physical vapor deposition approach is beneficial for the fabrication of highly conductive transparent electrode. The coating of freestanding polymer fiber network from both sides will form the metal/polymer coreshell mesh structure.…”

Magnetic Nanowires and Nanotubes

“…Aside from polymeric fibres with magnetic particles, one can also obtain metallic and oxide fibres via the combination with sol-gel chemistry and postprocessing (Khalil et al 2013;thermal annealing, calcination). Electrospinning enables almost industrial fabrication of very long free-standing wires and their networks/clusters, as well as preparation of shorter structures (Sakar et al 2016;Fig.…”