I have ultra porous electrospun fiber samples with or without micro/nano surface porosity which I would like compare the porosity and/or surface area values with smooth electrospun polymer fibers. I have a feeling that commonly mercury porosimetry has been used for this purpose. Do you have any experience in this method? Can you suggest any other technique?
thanks!
The BET (Brunauer, Emmett and Teller) method uses the adsorption and desorption of gases such as N2 to measure surface area. You may want to search for use of the BET method and for the types of conjugated polymers that you are electrospinning. There are a few highly cited papers on electrospun fibers including:
"Electrospinning of chitosan dissolved in concentrated acetic acid solution," by Xinying Geng, Oh-Hyeong Kwon, Jinho Jang, Biomaterials, Volume 26, Issue 27, September 2005, Pages 5427–5432.
"Transport properties of electrospun nylon 6 nonwoven mats"
Young Jun Ryu, Hak Yong Kim,, Keun Hyung Lee, Heui Chon Park, Douk Rae Lee, European Polymer Journal 39 (2003) 1883–1889.
Hope this helps.
Hello
Mercury porosimetry can also be used. It is suitable for a slightly different range of pore sizes than BET, but the two methods overlap. You can use both and combine the obtained information.
However, I would expect that you might have problems with mercury porosimetry - very high pressures are used in this method and if your material has a very high porosity, it can be fragile and collapse. So be careful about the interpretation of data.
Additionally, you should be careful with BET and nano-pores. If you expect nano-pores to be present, you have to use a modified evaluation procedure that accounts for their presence. However, this might be standardly included in modern instruments, I did not measure BET myself, so I am not sure.
Regards
Josef
To see the ultra porosity, you need to measure N2/Ar sorption and using BET method calculate the surface area. To get the idea about the pore size run the analysis starting from very low pressure region (10-7 relative pressure). DO the DFT pore size distribution calculation and cross check your pore size with HRTEM image of your sample.
regards
raeesh
Thanks for all the valuable comments. I will first focus mercury porosimetry since I am looking for macro pores mainly. then will move on to BET option
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