Laminated polyacrylonitrile nanofiber membrane codoped with boehmite nanoparticles for efficient electrostatic capture of particulate matters

Particulate matters (PMs) air pollution is identified as the major threat to public health and climate. High-performance air filter technology based on various electrospun nanofibers is considered as an effective strategy to eliminate the effects of PMs air pollution. However, to date, nearly all the existing micro-/nanofibers are hard to meet both requirements of high PMs removal efficiency and long service life. In this work, we reported the production of laminated polyacrylonitrile(PAN)-boehmite nanoparticles (BNPs) nanofiber structured membrane by the electrospinning process. The dimension of PAN-BNPs nanofiber can be tunable from (0.09 ± 0.03) μm to (0.81 ± 0.11) μm by controlling the PAN and BNPs concentrations in precursors. The optimized PAN-BNPs nanofiber air filter with a basis weight of 1 g m−2 demonstrates the attractive attributes of high PM2.5 removal efficiency up to 99.962% and low pressure drop of 58 Pa. Most importantly, after introducing the BNPs as electret, the removal efficiency is very stable under the air flow rate of 6 l min−1. This PAN-BNPs nanofiber with a long electrostatic duration time offers an approach for fabricating future high-performance air filters.