Fabrication, Applications, and Prospects of Aramid Nanofiber

Abstract

Aramid nanofibers (ANFs) are of great interest in various applications due to its 1D nanoscale, high aspect ratio, high specific surface area, excellent strength, and modulus as well as impressive chemical and thermal stabilities. It is considered as one of the most promising nano-sized building blocks with excellent properties and has therefore drawn increasing attention since 2011. However, no review has summarized the research progress and the prospective challenges of ANF. Herein, the methods of ANF fabrication and their relative merits are comprehensively discussed together with the challenges and progress in the deprotonation method for preparing ANF. The fabrication methods and development of ANF-based advanced materials with different macroscopic morphologies, including the 1D ANF aerogel fiber, 2D ANF film/nanopaper/coating, and 3D ANF gel and particle are also described. Furthermore, the applications of ANF in nanocomposite reinforcement, battery separators, electrical insulation nanopaper, flexible electronics, and adsorption and filtration media are presented. Additionally, the possible challenges and outlooks toward the future development of ANF are highlighted. This review indicates that the ANF and ANF-based materials mentioned herein will boost the development of next-generation advanced functional materials.

The bottom‐up synthesis for aramid nanofibers: The influence of copolymerization

“…[2,3] Preparation of aramid nanofibers (ANFs) is one of the hotspots in researches of high-performance polymer materials in recent years. [4] Retaining the excellent mechanical properties, ANFs have high-specific surface area and good dispersibility in solvent, which can be easily used to fabricate functional nanocomposites as a kind of nanoscale building block. [5,6] For example, ANFs have been used to construct battery separators exhibiting excellent performances, [7][8][9][10] aramid papers with high-mechanical strength and great thermal stability for high-grade insulation demands, [11] nanocomposites with the incorporation with graphene or multiwalled carbon nanotubes, and many other functional materials.…”

“…[5] However, it is not popular to involve conventional electrospinning for the preparation of ANFs due to the limitation on the mechanical performances and film-like forms of the final products. [4] The most widely used method toward ANFs was inspired by deprotonation of amide groups, [26][27][28][29] which is a top-down method proposed by Kotov et al to prepare uniform ionized PPTA nanofibers from macroscopic Kevlar fiber. [30] Negatively charged groups generated by deprotonation destroy the intermolecular hydrogen bonds, isolate the polymer chains, and make the produced nanofibers dispersed via electrostatic repulsion.…”

Antibacterial polymer nanofiber-coated and high elastin protein-expressing BMSCs incorporated polypropylene mesh for accelerating healing of female pelvic floor dysfunction

“…Nanotechnology was applied in several research directions, and materials with different components and nanostructures were also developed to fulfill different requirements [1][2][3][4][5]. As a kind of nanomaterials, nanofibers prepared by organic or inorganic materials through the method of electrospinning were widely researched due to their advantages such as high porosity, specific surface area, and lightweight [6][7][8]. In the biomedical field, polymer nanofibers, such as polylactic acid (PLA), chitosan, and silk fibroin [9][10][11], can be applied as tissue regeneration scaffold and drug delivery system [12].…”

Structural, Optical and Thermal Characterization of Wholly Aromatic Poly(ether amide)s Synthesized by Phosphorylation‐Based Condensation Polymerization

“…Fully aromatic polyamides, known as aramids, are high performance synthetic polymers in which repeating units containing aromatic (mostly phenyl) rings are linked together by amide (CO-NH) groups. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] The amide groups contribute to form strong interchain interactions that are resistant to solvent and heat, while the aromatic rings prevent polymer chains from rotating and twisting around their chemical bonds. [8][9][10] There are two types of aramids: meta and para.…”