Preparation and Characterization of Fibrillated Nanofibrous Filter Material

Abstract

The nanofiber, which diameter less than 1000 nm, has been discovered as advanced fiber material for high efficiency filtration. Tencel fiber is a new kind of regenerated fiber which can be easily fibrillated by a mechanical beating process to form nanofiber morphology. The present study shows the nanofiber morphology of Tencel fiber and investigates how the structure and properties of filter material change with the impact of fibrillated nanofiber. The results show a mass of nanofibril appeared after the Tencel fiber is intensively beat. At the same time, the air permeability and pore size of filter material is decreased with the decrease of fibrillated nanofiber content while the strength gets an opposite trend. Whats more, the filtration efficiency of the filter material is significantly enhanced by fibrillated nanofiber which filtration rate achieves 6.3 for particles bigger than 4 μm at 20 wt%. This paper has shed some light on the application of fibrillated fibrillated nanofiber to enhance the efficiency of filter material effectively.