Lignin-Based Electrospun Carbon Nanofibers

Abstract

The article summarizes the scientific progress that has occurred in the past several years in regard to the preparation of carbon nanofibers from lignin as a low-cost environmentally-friendly raw material using electrospinning. It presents an overview of using lignin, electrospinning, and carbonization to convert lignin to carbon nanofibers. Lignin is a renewable source for carbon material, and it is very abundant in nature. It is mostly produced as a byproduct from the paper industry and biomass fractionation. Despite its extensive availability and beneficial properties, only a few studies have reported on its use in electronic applications. Lignin-based carbon nanofibers have a high surface area, high porosity, and good electrical conductivity; thus, it is proposed that they are suitable for future energy storage applications.

Multilayered Bio-Based Electrospun Membranes: A Potential Porous Media for Filtration Applications

“…Electrospun nanofibers have attracted substantial attention in numerous applications such as filtration (Bassyouni et al, 2019), tissue engineering (Kouhi et al, 2019), wound dressing (Rezvani Ghomi et al, 2019), encapsulation for drug delivery operation (Ranjbar-Mohammadi et al, 2016), and self-healing (Neisiany et al, 2017), because of their facile and cost-efficient fabrication method and special features (Mohammadzadehmoghadam and Dong, 2019). Electrospinning offers versatile production of fibers with diameters in the order of 10 nanometers to several micrometers from a variety of raw materials (Kumar et al, 2019). Moreover, electrospun membranes have several advantages for filtration application due to their high amount of porosity (approximately 80%), including both open and interconnected pore structures and high specific surface area.…”

“…Furthermore, the biofouling issues are another drawback of electrospun membranes. Several approaches such as nanomaterial incorporation (Vijay Kumar et al, 2019), as well as surface chemistry manipulation or using bio-based polymers (Liu Z. et al, 2019;Lv et al, 2019;Zhu et al, 2019), have been investigated to address the aforementioned shortcomings. Multilayered electrospun membranes have been proposed to facilitate the combination of electrospun nanofibers with bio-based nanoparticles and nanowhiskers to overcome such obstacles (Qin and Wang, 2008).…”

Investigation of Structure and Chemical Composition of Carbon Nanofibers Developed From Renewable Precursor

“…Unlike other spinning methods, electrospinning generally produces fibers with diameters in the range of 0.05-5 µm (Doshi and Reneker, 1995). Therefore, these lignin-based fibers have considerably larger specific surface areas compared to those of fibers obtained by other spinning techniques, making electrospun lignin-based carbon fibers potentially suitable for gas separation, water purification, as well as energy storage applications, wherein high-specific-surface-area materials are highly preferred (Wang et al, 2013;Jin et al, 2014;Lai et al, 2014;Kai et al, 2015;García-Mateos et al, 2019;Kumar et al, 2019;Salinas-Torres et al, 2019).…”

State of the Art and New Directions on Electrospun Lignin/Cellulose Nanofibers for Supercapacitor Application: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The extraction processes of these materials are equally simple and less energy consuming. Thus, lignin/cellulose nanofibers are economically favorable and readily available precursor materials for making carbon nanofiber [78,102,103]. The market for low-cost green and sustainable carbonaceous electrode materials makes lignin/cellulose nanofiber a safer electrode material compared to other costly and harmful materials such as PAN [74,104].…”