Fabrication of Silica anofibers via Electrospinning/Post Thermal Treatment

In this study the silica electrospun nanofibers were fabricated using silica sol containing tetraethyl orthosilicate(TEOS), poly vinyl pyrrolidone(PVP), butanol(Solvent) .This should be refer to as a two step process which in the first pace the effectuation of the electrospinning process was done and in the second pace it was followed by the calcination process. After several tries the perfect concentration for silica sol to undergo the electrospinning was found to be 0.095 gr(pvp)/ml(butanol,TEOS), which TEOS/butanol volume ratio was 3:2 . Hereafter so as to optimize the electrospinning process parameters some more experiments were done employing the mentioned concentration. Accordingly the electrospinning process was done under a certain specification of high voltage power supply , tip to collector distance , collector’s rotational speed, pumping rate and stainless steel needle. Later with the intention of achieving the silica nanofibers , the electrospun samples afterwards were transferred to a furnace and baked at 700 °C for 3 hours .After that the Morphological studies on the fibers before and after the thermal treatment were done employing the SEM images . The results showed that fiber diameter before thermal treatment fits the μm scale while it decreases dramatically to the 260-360 nm range when it goes through thermal stage and also the fibers before the thermal treatment are more aligned which is due to the heat rate they were exposed to in the furnace. Furthermore FT-IR and EDX spectrums proved that PVP and butanol were removed from the fibers after calcination and that silica nanofibers were fabricated

Keywords:

Silica. Nanofiber. PVP. Electrospinning , Thermal Treatment