Preface This book is based upon the Symposium on Polymeric Nanofibers that was held in New York, New York at the 226 National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) September 7-11, 2003. The symposium had about 75 oral presentations and posters. Although the use of electrical forces to produce fibers traces back into the 1800s, the development of the science and technology relevant to the production of polymeric fibers with nanometer-scale diameters never became an important part of the textile fiber industry, which came to rely upon fibers with much larger diameters. Nonwoven sheets that contained short nanofibers were produced inexpensively from polyethylene. Expanded polytetrafluoroethylene sheets containing nanofibers were produced and used as a water barrier in clothing. Both served large and profitable markets but neither was widely recognized as containing nanofibers. In the last quarter of the 1900s, electrospun polymeric nanofibers were used in the filtration industry in the United States and for gas masks in the Soviet Union, but the processes were kept secret by the manufacturers. As the broad field of nanotechnology gained widespread recognition in the 1990s, it was recognized that electrospinning provides a route to the creation of very longfiberswith nanoscale diameters. The required apparatus is simple and operates well at the laboratory scale. The electro-hydro-dynamical science relevant to electrospinning is intellectually challenging. The growth of interest in that decade was rapid. At about the time this symposium was held, electrospinning and nanofibers were recognized, by analysis of publication rates and patterns of citations, as a fast moving front of materials science. This book contains papers that were among the first to describe the many directions in which the science and technology of polymer nanofibers is now evolving. This symposium was cosponsored by the ACS Division of Polymer Science, Inc. and by the Fiber Society. Advice on the organization was provided by Frank Ko, Heidi Schreuder Gibson,
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Gregory Rutledge, and Wayne Jones, who served as chairpersons for the four sessions in which oral presentations were made.
Darrell H. Reneker Maurice Morton Institute of Polymer Science The University of Akron Akron, OH 44325-3909
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Hao Fong Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering South Dakota School of Mines and Technology 501 East St. Joseph Street Rapid City, SD 57701-3901
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Polymeric Nanofibers
Reneker and Fong; Polymeric Nanofibers ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2006.
