A Feasible Way to Produce Carbon Nanofiber by Electrospinning from Sugarcane Bagasse

Recently, the nanofiber materials derived from natural polymers instead of petroleum-based polymers by electrospinning have aroused a great deal of interests. The lignocellulosic biomass could not be electrospun into nanofiber directly due to its poor solubility. Here, sugarcane bagasse (SCB) was subjected to the homogeneous esterification with different anhydrides, and the corresponding esterified products (SCB-A) were obtained. It was found that the bead-free and uniform nanofibers were obtained via electrospinning even when the mass fraction of acetylated SCB was 70%. According to the thermogravimetric analyses, the addition of SCB-A could improve the thermal stability of the electrospun composite nanofibers. More importantly, in contrast to the pure polyacrylonitrile (PAN) based carbon nanofiber, the SCB-A based carbon nanofibers had higher electrical conductivity and the surface N element content. In addition, the superfine carbon nanofiber mats with minimum average diameter of 117.0 ± 13.7 nm derived from SCB-A were obtained, which results in a larger Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) surface area than pure PAN based carbon nanofiber. These results demonstrated that the combination of the homogeneous esterification and electrospinning could be a feasible and potential way to produce the bio-based carbon nanofibers directly from lignocellulosic without component separation.