Transformation of fibrous membranes from opaque to transparent under mechanical pressing

Abstract There is a great demand for transparent films, membranes, or substrates in the fields of intelligent wearables, electronic skins, air filtration, and tissue engineering. Traditional materials such as glass and plastics cannot satisfy these requirements because of the lack of interconnected pores, undesirable porosity, and flexibility. Electrospun fibrous membranes offset these shortcomings because they contain small pores and have high porosity as well as outstanding flexibility. Thus, the development of transparent electrospun fibrous membranes is of great value. This work reports a simple and effective way to develop flexible and porous transparent fibrous membranes (TFMs) directly from electrospun fibrous membranes via mechanical pressing, without employing any other additives. In addition, the relationship between the transparency performance and the molecular structure of the polymers after pressing was summarized for the first time. After mechanical pressing, the membranes maintained fibrous morphology, micron-sized pores, and desired porosity. Polystyrene fibrous membranes, which exhibited excellent optical and mechanical properties, were used as a reference. The TFMs possessed high transparency (∼89% visible light transmittance at 550 nm), high porosity (10%–30%), and strong mechanical tensile strength (∼148 MPa), nearly 78 times that of the pristine electrospun fibrous membranes. Moreover, this study demonstrated that transparent and conductive membranes can be fabricated based on TFMs using vacuum-assisted filtration of silver nanowires followed by mechanical pressing. Compared with indium tin oxide films, conductive TFMs exhibited good electrical conductivities (9 Ω per square (Ω·sq−1), 78% transmittance at 550 nm) and notable mechanical performance (to bear abundant bending stresses).