Fabrication of fiber-reinforced polymer ceramic composites by wet electrospinning

Abstract

We propose a novel approach of wet electrospinning to yield fiber-reinforced polymer ceramic composites, where a reactive ceramic precursor gel is used as a collector. We illustrate our approach by generating polyethylene oxide (PEO) fibers in a potassium silicate gel; the gel is later activated using metakaolin to yield a ceramic-0.5 wt% PEO fiber composite. An increase of 29% and 22% is recorded for the fabricated polymer ceramic composites in terms of indentation modulus and indentation hardness respectively. Our initial findings demonstrate the process viability and might lead to a potentially scalable manufacturing approach for fiber-reinforced polymer ceramic composites.