Uniaxially Aligned Poly(p-phenylene vinylene) and Carbon Nanofiber Yarns through Electrospinning of a Precursor

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Nanofibers made of conducting or semiconducting polymers have been extensively studied from both fundamental and technological aspects to understand their intrinsic electrical and mechanical properties and practical use for elecctromagnetic interference shielding, conducting textiles, and applications to high-sensitive sensors and fast-responsive actuators utilizing their high speccific surface area (Okuzaki, 2006). Poly(p-phenylene vinylene) (PPV) has been paid considerable attention due to its properties of electrical conductivity, electroor photoluminescence, and non-linear optical response, which have potential applications in electrical and optical devices, such as light-emitting diodes (Burrourghes et al., 1991), solar cells (Sariciftci et al., 1993), and field-effect transistors (Geens et al., 2001). Most of the work with regard to PPV exploits thin coatings or cast films (Okuzaki et al., 1999), while a few reports have been investigated on PPV nanofibers by chemical vapor deposition polymerization with nanoporous templates (Kim & Jin, 2001). The electrospinning, a simple, rapid, inexpensive, and template-free method, capable of producing submicron to nanometer scale fibers is applied to fabricate nanofibers of conducting polymers, such as sulphuric acid-doped polyaniline (Reneker & Chun, 1996) or a blend of camphorsulfonic acid-doped polyaniline and poly(ethylene oxide) (MacDiarmid et al., 2001). However, the electrospinning is not applicable to PPV because of its insoluble and infusible nature. Although poly[2-methoxy-5-(2’-ethylhexyloxy)-1,4-phenylenevinylene], an electro-luminescent derivative of PPV, could be electrospun from 1,2-dichloroethane solution as a randomly oriented mesh, the resulting fibers were not uniform exhibiting leaflike or ribbon-like morphology due to the low viscosity limited by the polymer solubility (Madhugiri et al., 2003). On the other hand, carbon nanofibers have superior mechanical properties, electrical conductivity, and large specific surface area, which are promising for various potential applications in nanocomposites such as electromagnetic interference shielding (Yang et al., 2005), rechargeable batteries (Kim et al., 2006), and supercapacitors (Kim et al., 2004). Currently, the carbon nanofibers are fabricated by a traditional vapor growth (Endo, 1988), arc discharge (Iijima, 1991), laser ablation, and chemical vapor deposition (Ren et al., 1998), but they involve complicated processes and high equipment costs for the fabrication. Reneker et al. fabricated carbon nanofibers by carbonization of electrospun polyacrylonitrile