Abstract
Carbon fibers belong to the materials of high interest in medical application due to their good mechanical properties and because they are chemically inert at room temperature. Carbon nanofiber mats, which can be produced by electrospinning diverse precursor polymers, followed by thermal stabilization and carbonization, are under investigation as possible substrates for cell growth, especially for possible 3D cell growth applications in tissue engineering. However, such carbon nanofiber mats may be too brittle to serve as a reliable substrate. Here we report on a simple method of creating highly robust carbon nanofiber mats by using electrospun polyacrylonitrile/ZnO nanofiber mats as substrates. We show that the ZnO-blended polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanofiber mats have significantly increased fiber diameters, resulting in enhanced mechanical properties and thus supporting tissue engineering applications.
Highlights
Electrospinning allows for the creation of thin fibers in the diameter range between some ten and several hundred micrometers from diverse polymers or polymer blends [1]
The morphology of the raw electrospun PAN/ZnO nanofiber mats is depicted in Figure 1, images with identical magnification, taken at different sample positions
PAN/ZnO nanofiber mats were prepared by electrospinning, resulting in nanofibers with diameters resulted in highly flexible nanofiber mats
Summary
Electrospinning allows for the creation of thin fibers in the diameter range between some ten and several hundred micrometers from diverse polymers or polymer blends [1]. One of the typical materials often used as a precursor of carbon nanofibers is polyacrylonitrile (PAN) [12,13] This polymer has the additional advantage of being spinnable from the low-toxic solvent dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) [14]. Such PAN nanofiber mats can afterwards be stabilized, typically in air, to enable a chemical cyclization process, including the oxidation, aromatization, dehydrogenation, crosslinking and formation of a thermally stable aromatic ladder polymer [15,16,17,18]. This first thermal treatment can be performed, for example, by heating the nanofiber mat to temperatures around 260 ◦ C–290 ◦ C, approached with heating rates between 0.5 K/min and 5 K/min [19,20,21], but can be performed with higher temperatures [22] or split into two different stages [23]
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