Large-scale blow spinning of heat-resistant nanofibrous air filters

摘要

Particulate matter(PM)pollution has become a serious problem worldwide and various kinds of nanofibrous filters aiming to solve the problem have been developed.It is urgent to remove PM from high-temperature pollution sources,such as industrial emissions,coal furnaces,and automobile exhaust gases.However,filtration at pollution sources remains challenging because most existing air filters are not resistant to high temperature.Herein,heat-resistant polyimide(PI)nanofibrous air filters are fabricated via a simple and scalable solution blow-spinning method.These air filters show excellent thermal stability at high temperature up to 420℃.They exhibit a filtration efficiency as high as 99.73%at ambient temperature and over 97%at 300℃.In addition,a field test shows that the filters remove>97%of PM from the car exhaust fumes.Hence,the blow-spun PI nanofibrous membranes combined with the facile preparation strategy have great potential in high temperature air filtration fields and other similar applications such as water purification and protein separation.