| Among the several techniques used to produce nanofibers, electrospinning stands out to be the most convenient in terms of simplicity, cost and versatility. It is a bench top technique that allows the production of fibers with diameters ranging from few micrometers to tens of nanometers. Porous, hollow, core-shell or composite nanofibers can be fabricated by adjusting the electrospinning parameters or by incorporating metal oxides, biological agents, and nanostructures into the fibers. Due to their high porosity, their high specific surface area and their countless ways to be functionalized, electrospun nanofibers have found wide applications in the industrial, biomedical and environmental fields. In the first part of this study, electrospun hollow fiber membranes and electrospun composite membranes were produced and their desalination and adsorption performance were tested, respectively. The work on fabricating electrospun composite gold fibers is presented in the last part of this study. These fibers were used in sensing the concentration of a DNA repair protein. |
