Abstract
Patterned, continuous carbon fibers with controlled surface geometry were produced from a novel melt-processible carbon precursor. This portends the use of a unique technique to produce such technologically innovative fibers in large volume for important applications. The novelties of this technique include ease of designing and fabricating fibers with customized surface contour, the ability to manipulate filament diameter from submicron scale to a couple of orders of magnitude larger scale, and the amenable porosity gradient across the carbon wall by diffusion controlled functionalization of precursor. The geometry of fiber cross-section was tailored by using bicomponent melt-spinning with shaped dies and controlling the melt-processing of the precursor polymer. Circular, trilobal, gear-shaped hollow fibers, and solid star-shaped carbon fibers of 0.5 - 20 um diameters, either in self-assembled bundle form, or non-bonded loose filament form, were produced by carbonizing functionalized-polyethylene fibers. Prior to carbonization, melt-spun fibers were converted to a char-forming mass by optimizing the sulfonation on polyethylene macromolecules. The fibers exhibited distinctly ordered carbon morphologies at the outside skin compared to the inner surface or fiber core. Such order in carbon microstructure can be further tuned by altering processing parameters. Partially sulfonated polyethylene-derived hollow carbon fibers exhibit 2-10 fold surface area (50-500 m2/g) compared to the solid fibers (10-25 m2/g) with pore sizes closer to the inside diameter of the filaments larger than the sizes on the outer layer. These specially functionalized carbon fibers hold promise for extraordinary performance improvements when used, for example, as composite reinforcements, catalyst support media, membranes for gas separation, CO2 sorbents, and active electrodes and current collectors for energy storage applications.
