Hierarchical porous carbon nanofibrous membranes with an enhanced shape memory property for effective adsorption of proteins

Designing and fabricating hierarchical porous carbon nanofibrous (CNF) membranes with good mechanical properties is an attractive and challenging work for the next generation of functional separation materials. Here, we demonstrate a novel strategy to create a heterostructured CNF membrane with multiscale pores via multicomponent electrospinning and nano-doping methods. The resultant membrane exhibits an intriguing shape memory property, which can be bent to a radius < 100 mu m without any fracture and recover from the deformation rapidly. Besides that, the carbonaceous nanofibrous membrane is quite soft like polymer based wrapping paper. Such robust mechanical properties may be attributed to the plasticizer effect of the doped SiO2 nanoparticles and the protogenetic graphitized carbon layers in the carbon matrix. More interesting, benefitting from the functional nitrogenous groups and the hierarchical porous structures, these CNF membranes possess a high adsorption capacity for target protein molecules and high water permeability (15 202 +/- 1927 L m(-2) h(-1) under 3 kPa driven pressure), which is an order of magnitude higher than the commercial polymer based affinity membranes. As this technology is effective and easy to operate, more multifunctional CNF based nanoscale materials could be developed for the next generation of highly efficient proteins separations.