Synthesis of aligned titanium-based oxide fibre arrays

Abstract

A successful method based on the electrospinning technique to prepare continuous, parallel, well-aligned, inorganic fibre arrays was developed in this work. An ultra-high-molecular-weight polymer was used to suppress jet whipping motion to synthesise continuous, well-aligned, fibre arrays via electrospinning. Ultra-long, parallel, well-aligned, titanium-based oxides including TiO2, Li2TiO3, and ZnTiO3 binary and ternary ceramic fibres were prepared by the modified electrospinning method, which is rather difficult to do by other methods when trying to synthesise a well-aligned final structure. The effects of electrospinning conditions, such as the applied voltage, ratio of organic solvent to inorganic solvent, solvent type, and collecting drum rate of rotation on the size and morphology of the fibres was studied to demonstrate the growth mechanism of the prepared fibre arrays. The technique based on the ultra-high-molecular-weight polymer and electrospinning developed in this work can be extended to other ternary oxide nanofibre fabrication, and is beneficial for the development of one-dimensional nanostructures in optical and electrical fields.