ORIGINAL PAPER Novel electrospun luminescent nanofibers from cationic polyfluorene/cellulose acetate blend Rebeca Va´zquez-Guillo´ • Alex Calero • Artur J. M. Valente • Hugh D. Burrows • C. Reyes Mateo • Ricardo Mallavia Received: 16 May 2012 / Accepted: 22 October 2012 / Published online: 2 November 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012 Abstract This work reports production of nanofibers of cellulose acetate (CA) via electrospinning (ES) technology. Optimal operating conditions to produce nanofibers have been found to involve CA solutions at 20 wt% concentration, flow rate 1.0 mL h -1 , a dis- tance between needle tip-collector target of 15 cm and an applied voltage at 20 kV. Under these experimental conditions, nanofibers were produced by ES a solu- tion containing a low concentration of a luminescent fluorene-based cationic conjugated polyelectrolyte. Electronic and optical microscopies were used to characterize their morphology and the diameter of fibers (over 260 nm). Composite fibers with excellent luminescence properties have been obtained and studied in the solid state. Potential applications in a sensing device for nitrobenzene have been tested. Keywords Electrospinning  Cellulose acetate  Fluorene-based polymers  Polyelectrolyte  Nanofibers Introduction Electrospinning (ES) is a powerful technique that has been widely used in recent years, because of its simplicity and versatility, providing long polymeric fibers with diameters ranging from about 50 nm to several micrometre (Maretschek et al. 2008), with ease of functionalization and good mechanical properties. For this reason, potential applications of electrospun polymer fibers have been explored in areas such as, electrical and optical applications, nano-sensors, filters, electrostatical protections for clothes, high performance structures, biomedical devices and var- ious other industrial applications (Huang et al. 2003; Agarwal et al. 2008; Yang et al. 2009; Christoforou and Doumanidis 2010; Liu et al. 2010; Du et al. 2011; Hou et al. 2012; Wang et al. 2012) A typical ES process uses an electric field to create nanofibers from a drop of polymer solution. An electric field is applied between two electrodes. The polymer solution is at the positive electrode (anode), while the negative elec- trode is a collector target. When the applied electric field overcomes the surface tension, a jet is ejected from the surface of a charged polymer solution. The ejected jet travels rapidly to the collector target located at some distance from the charged polymer solution and, as the jet dries, is collected in the form of a solid polymer filament. The polymer chain entanglements within the solution prevent the ES jet from breaking up. The jet is electrically charged and the charge causes fibers to bend in such a way that every time the Rebeca Va´zquez-Guillo´ and Alex Calero contributed equally. R. Va´zquez-Guillo´  A. Calero  C. Reyes Mateo  R. Mallavia (&) Instituto de Biologı ´a Molecular y Celular, Universidad Miguel Hernandez de Elche, Avda. de la Universidad s/n, 03202 Elche, Spain e-mail: r.mallavia@umh.es A. J. M. Valente  H. D. Burrows Department of Chemistry, University of Coimbra, 3004-535 Coimbra, Portugal 123 Cellulose (2013) 20:169–177 DOI 10.1007/s10570-012-9809-y