Novel porous film-like materials

Melt blowing is an extrusion process that produces nonwovens with fine fibers in the 1 to 10 micron diameter range, and finds applications in filtration, sound and liquid absorbency and thermal insulation. Co-extrusion is a process where two polymer resins in the molten state are arranged via feed blocks or layer multipliers to give alternating layers. We have made microfibers that have multiple layers within each fiber (Figure 1) and using temperature and pressure have demonstrated that the multi layer microfiber webs can be converted to materials that appear as films but have the internal structure of fibers, which we refer to as filbers. The structure and properties of different type of filber materials have been studied and will be presented.