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Abstract
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Up to the present, nanofibers have been prepared from an assortment of materials, such as natural polymers, carbon-based nanomaterials, semiconducting nanomaterials, and composite nanomaterials. Producing composite nanofibers from biological template materials (e.g. peptides, proteins, polymers, carbohydrate, virus, bacteral cellulose etc.) as novel nanostructures and biological materials has attracted researchers due to their potential applications in tissue engineering, drug delivery, regenerative medicine, biosensing, sensors, and filter air pollutants, and also because of their unique properties such as the high surface area and porosity and good biocompatibility. In this sense, there has been a great focus on the catalytic activity of nanofibers due to the unique properties i.e. high catalytic efficiency, stabilizing metal nanoparticles, preventing aggregation of the nanoparticles and high specific surface area. Thus, in this review, we focus on two topics: (1) the preparation methods of nanofibers, nanorods and whiskers (2) the investigations of various nanofibers, nanorods and whiskers catalytic materials in the electrocatalyst, photocatalyst, organo catalyst, thermal catalysis and morphology as well as related catalytic mechanisms are summarized and discussed.
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