Fiber Splitting of Bicomponent Meltblown Fiber Nonwovens and
Its Potential to Produce Submicron fibers
Christine (Qin) Sun, and Dong Zhang
Various bicomponent meltblown fiber webs were successfully produced with bico pairs of PP,
PE, PET, PBT, PA6, PTT, PLA, ect. at bico weight ratios of 25/75, 50/50, and 75/25. The
process development and data analysis were conducted by surface response methodology (SRM)
to systematically explore the potentials of novel bicomponent meltblown technology. Non-round
side-by-side cross-sectional fiber morphology and more twisted fibers were observed via SEM
for the bico meltblown webs, including PP/PBT, PE/PBT, PP/PA, PP/PET, PE/PET , PP/PLA.
The smallest fiber diameter achieved for most bico pairs was in the range of 1-1.5 μm. A
continuing effort was made to obtain submicron meltbown fiber nonwovens by subsequently
splitting the side-by-side fibers.
Two approaches of post-treatment were applied — mechanical method and chemical method.
The mechanical method was intended to split each component apart in a side-by-side bico fiber
using hydro-entanglement, which utilized a pressurized stream of water to split the multicomponent conjugate fibers. For chemical treatment, substantial portion of the conjugate fibers
was removed by a dissolving process and the un-dissolvable part remained in the fibers. Figure 1
shows the web structures by SEM after each treatment.
25PET/75PA6 (hydroentanglement,120 bars)
75PLA/25PP (chemical solution treatment)
The split fiber structure showed smaller size, enhanced barrier and softness, which also
demonstrated the great potential to produce the submicron meltblown fiber nonwoven webs by
post-treatment of the bico meltblown webs.