The Fabrication And Characaterization Of Polymer-ZnO Composite Nanofibers

Nano-scaled semiconducting materials have attracted much attention due to their unique optical, electrical, thermal, magnetic and other properties. ZnO is a direct band-gap semiconductor material, it has a wide band gap of 3.37eV at room temperature and a large exciton binding energy of 60meV. Because the fineness of particle size and the dramatic increase in surface area of nano-ZnO, nano-ZnO exhibits surface effect, small size effect and macroscopic quantum tunneling effect compared with bulk ZnO. Thus, nano-ZnO has become one of the most promising materials in the field of semiconductor materials research, such as optoelectronics, photochemical and microelectronics areas.In this paper, polyacrylonitrile-zinc oxide(PAN-ZnO) and polyvinylalcohol-zinc oxide(PVA-ZnO) nano-composite fibers were prepared successfully by the combination of electrospinning technique and hydro-and solvothermal synthesis. First of all, we prepared precursor solution by sol-gel method; second, we electrospun precursor solution to one-dimensional nanofibers by electrospinning technique; last, under the premise of not destroying the structure of fibers, we let the zinc acetate in the fibers react with alkali under the condition of hydro-and solvothermal synthesis so as to produce polyacrylonitrile-zinc oxide(PAN-ZnO) and polyvinylalcohol-zinc oxide(PVA-ZnO) nano-composite fibers. Scanning electron microscopy(SEM), energy-dispersive spectrum(EDS), X-ray diffraction(XRD), resonant raman(Raman) spectra and photoluminescence(PL) spectra were employed to examine the morphologies, substance phase, structures and optical properties of the products, the results showed that we prepared one-dimensional PAN-ZnO and PVA-ZnO nano-composite fibers; at the same time,PAN-ZnO and PVA-ZnO nano-composite fibers both have good luminescence properties.Polymer nanofibers were prepared by electrospinning technique, so as to control one-dimensional property and nano-scale characteristic of composite materials, combining with the characteristic of controling the experimental conditions by hydro-and solvothermal synthesis, so we developed a new way which is simple and effective to prepare one-dimensional nanomaterials. We hope electrospinning technique and hydro-and solvothermal synthesis can also be more widely used in the preparation of optoelectronic functional composites.