How Porous Nanofibers Have Enhanced the Engineering of Advanced Materials: A Review

Nanofibers are one-dimensional nanomaterials with a superfine diameter and many potential applications due to their desirable characteristics such as small diameter, high surface area, high flexibility, high porosity, and special mechanical properties. In the recent years, porous nanofibers have been the subject of considerable research works in a wide range of applications owing to high surface area to volume ratios and high porosity ratio. Combination of superfine diameter and porosity in porous nanofibers represent an emergent class of nanoporous materials with maximum conceivable specific surface area, high pores volume and extreme adsorption capacity that could lead to improvement in many applications such as tissue engineering, catalysts, sensors, batteries, energy storage, adsorption/separation, filtration, medical applications, solar cells, superhydrophobic surfaces, supercapacitors, and conductors. The present review focuses on the current progresses in the fabrication mechanisms and characterization methods of porous nanofibers. In addition, some application capabilities of porous nanofibers that were reported in literature are discussed and an outline of future trends is presented.