Electro spun PAN Nanofiber with Optimized Diameter

Abstract

The recent trends in nanotechnology have led to an improvement in the manufacturing quality of smaller mechanical, electronics, and optical products and devices; all the attention is focused on producing compact, portable, and lightweight equipment and devices to reduce the overall energy consumption. Nanofibers are increasingly being used in a variety of applications. As a result, the researcher focuses on the development of nanofibers. They can be produced by various techniques, but the electrospinning method is the most commonly used in the industry. Polymer solutions can be used to create fibers with diameters, which has a high rate of production and requires a relatively low cost. In this work, an effort is made to produce nanofibers of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) insolvent dimethyl formamide (DMF) that have a minimum diameter. Four important controllable parameters are considered, which can affect the electrospinning process and resultant PAN nanofibers: flow rate, applied voltage, concentration, and distance between the collectors drum and syringe tip. The Taguchi design approach has been used to find the optimized electrospinning parameters that result in the minimum PAN nanofiber diameter. The diameter and surface morphology of PAN nanofibers were analyzed using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The results were used to find the variance (ANOVA) analysis, which explains the significance of the parameters on the diameter of PAN nanofiber and predicts that flow rate is the most dominating parameter for PAN nanofiber diameter. The optimized set of produces minimum fiber diameter of 58.467 nm.