Thermally-drawn fibers with spatially-selective porous domains

Benjamin Grena, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Etgar Levy, Alexander M. Stolyarov, John D. Joannopoulos and Yoel Fink ()
Additional contact information
Benjamin Grena: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jean-Baptiste Alayrac: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Etgar Levy: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alexander M. Stolyarov: MIT Lincoln Laboratory
John D. Joannopoulos: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Yoel Fink: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract The control of mass transport using porous fibers is ubiquitous, with applications ranging from filtration to catalysis. Yet, to date, porous fibers have been made of single materials in simple geometries, with limited function. Here we report the fabrication and characterization of thermally drawn multimaterial fibers encompassing internal porous domains alongside non-porous insulating and conductive materials, in highly controlled device geometries. Our approach utilizes phase separation of a polymer solution during the preform-to-fiber drawing process, generating porosity as the fiber is drawn. Engineering the preform structure grants control over the geometry and materials architecture of the final porous fibers. Electrical conductivity of the selectrolyte-filled porous domains is substantiated through ionic conductivity measurements using electrodes thermally drawn in the cross-section. Pore size tunability between 500 nm–10 µm is established by regulating the phase separation kinetics. We further demonstrate capillary breakup of cylindrical porous structures porous microspheres within the fiber core.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00375-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-017-00375-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00375-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().