Electrospun Polyimide Ultrafine Fibrous Membranes with Enhanced Atomic-Oxygen Resistance via Incorporation of POSS Components: Preparation and Properties

Polyimide (PI) represents a class of important materials in various space applications due to their high thermal resistance, good dielectric and mechanical properties, which make PIs good candidates for thermal control materials, electrical insulating coatings, solar cell substrates, and other protecting components on spacecraft. However, when the standard PIs are exposed to the severe space environment, they are subject to degradation of the thermal optical property through oxidation and etching by atomic oxygen (AO) in low Earth orbit (LEO). AO is created by the dissociation of molecular oxygen caused by solar ultraviolet radiation at wavelengths below 243 nm. Such property degradation has been a serious impediment for application of PIs for spacecraft. Therefore, the protection of PIs from long-term AO erosion has become one of the most important issues to be addressed in the design and manufacturing of spacecraft components operating in LEO. The PI films and composites have been most widely studied for the protection purpose from AO erosion. However, few works on the AO erosion and protection research on the PI fibers or fabrics have been reported up to now although PI fibers have increasingly attracted attention in space application. In this talk, I would like to present the most recent work in our lab on the AO resistance of PI nanofibrous membranes (NFMs) incorporated with POSS.

Dr. Wu Bohan has been working as a senior engineer at Beijing Institute of Spacecraft Environment Engineering since 2014. Her expertise is ground-based space environmental simulation, space material evaluation, and development of AO protection materials. She worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Basel, Switzerland and at Montana State University, USA. She got her PhD in Physical Chemistry at the University of Nottingham, UK. She has experience in the general field of physical chemistry with specialization in cluster science, molecular dynamics, high-resolution spectroscopy, and materials science.