Silk nanofibers as high efficient and lightweight air filter

Advanced Materials for Capturing Particulate Matter: Progress and Perspectives

“…PM pollution has become a serious concern to public health and individual face masks are widely used . Because of their daily high utilization rate, the comfort of face masks is indispensable .…”

“…In addition, in order to avoid people considering them hot, stuffy, and heavy, the thickness and weight of the filter cannot be too high. Because most masks are not disposable, the health and safety issues involved in reutilization should also be carefully considered …”

“…Currently, the development of CNT‐based air filters is faced with two main challenges: difficulties in fabrication and doubts about the toxicity of CNTs . In contrast, polymer nanofibers can be effectively produced on a large scale through a simple electrospinning technique .…”

“…[46a] Silk nanofibers (SF), which can be fabricated by electrospinning, have been mainly reported for use in biomedical applications such as tissue engineering . Most recently, an SF‐based air filter also showed superior purification performance in the filtration field, especially with a much lower basis weight compared to commercial microfiber air filters …”

“…An SF air filter harmless to humans was fabricated by Wang et al As shown in Figure b, the SF air filter shows a surprisingly higher filtration efficiency for PM 2.5 than commercial microfiber filters with a comparable pressure drop. For example, SNF#1 showed a PM 2.5 filtration efficiency of 78.5%, 5.5 times higher than that of PP fiber cloth (14.2%) with a comparable pressure drop.…”