Superhydrophobic electrospun POSS-PMMA copolymer fibres with highly ordered nanofibrillar and surface structures

Abstract

A POSS-PMMA copolymer has been synthesised by conventional free-radical polymerisation reaction. Uniform electrospun fibres from this copolymer showed a water contact angle as high as 165 degrees with a sliding angle as low as 6 degrees . For the first time, we found that the electrospun fibres had a bundled nanofibril secondary structure with an ordered POSS morphology on the fibre surface.

Literature review on superhydrophobic self‐cleaning surfaces produced by electrospinning

“…It can be seen from the table that only webs produced in ref. 82 and to some extent in ref. 64 can be considered as stable and self-cleaning.…”

“…Other silicone based polymers were synthesized by Ma et al 64 and Xue et al 82 and only these two papers in this section reported high WCA, low hysteresis and produced mechanically stable webs. Ma et al 64 utilized the low surface tension of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), but because this polymer cannot be made into solid fibers, the authors synthesized the PS-PDMS di-block copolymer and electrospun it from a mixture with pure PS in the THF:DMF solution.…”

“…Xue et al 82 fabricated a mechanically stable, self-cleaning web by electrospinning a copolymer of polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes (POSS) and polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA). Fibers with average diameters of 2.16 lm were produced from 5% by wt solutions of polymers in THF:DMF.…”

Tribological properties of synthetic base oil containing polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane grafted graphene oxide

“…17,18 Having eight organic groups surrounding a cagelike core connected by Si-O-Si bonds, POSS was highly soluble in many kinds of organic solvents. 19 In this article, we employed a covalent functionalization approach to obtain oil dispersible GO using aminopropylisobutyl polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS-NH 2 ) as modier (Fig.…”

Functional Applications

“…These unique characteristics plus the functionalities from the polymers themselves impart nanofibers with many desirable properties for advanced applications. Several methods have been developed to fabricate nanofibers, such as template (Ikegame et al, 2003), self-assembly (Hong et al, 2003), phase separation (Ma and Zhang, 1999), meltblowing (Ellison et al, 2007) and electrospinning (Doshi and Reneker, 1995, Lin et al, 2004, Lin et al, 2005a, Fang et al, 2007, Xue et al, 2009, Fang et al, 2010. Electrospinning has been regarded as the most promising approach to produce continuous nanofibers on a large scale and the fiber diameter can be adjusted from nanometers to micrometers (Li and Xia, 2004b).…”