Mechanical Properties, Morphologies, and Microstructures of Novel Electrospun Metallized Nanofibers

We report that the metal-deposited single nanofibers can be successfully prepared by electrospinning and metallization. The tensile strength of the metal-deposited single nanofibers as well as various non-metallized polymeric nanofibers was investigated by recently developed tensile test machine. The tensile strength of 50 nm metal-deposited single nanofibers was dramatically improved, which was much higher than that of pure polymer single nanofiber. The result is attributed to the formation of metallic hard-coating layers onto the surface of single nanofibers. The tensile strength of the metal-deposited single nanofibers was also depended on the types of metals (for instance, Cu, Ni, Sn, and Al) used for metallization. In addition, we investigated various annealing conditions, such as annealing temperature and time, and composition ratio of two metals (Cu and Ni), in order to find out optimum annealing process for the formation of metal alloy nanofibers. The characterization of the metallized nanofibers was conducted by field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD).