A comparative study on SiO₂ nanofiber production via two novel non-electrospinning methods: Centrifugal spinning vs solution blowing

A comparative study on the production of nanofibrous silica (SiO₂) mats via facile and innovative non-electro-spinning routes, solution blowing (SB) and centrifugal spinning (CS), and their subsequent calcination is presented. In all cases, highly flexible membranes composed of amorphous SiO₂ were obtained after calcination. This includes the first reported synthesis of SiO₂ fibers by the SB technique. The structure, composition, and porosity of the as-spun and calcined fibers were characterized. The results indicated that CS afforded a more homogeneous and defect-free fibrous structure, although the average fiber diameter was found to be higher than those obtained from SB. Thus, SB provides more compact SiO₂ fibrous mat which resulted in smaller pore size. The lower fiber diameter and pore size of the SB-SiO₂ mats renders them more suited to filtration and separation applications, whilst the fluffier CS-SiO₂ outputs would be advantageously adopted for thermal insulation applications.