Self-cleaning properties of electrospun PVA/TiO2 and PVA/ZnO nanofibers composites

Abstract

In this report, polyvinyl alcohol/zinoxide (PVA/ZnO) & polyvinyl alcohol/titanium dioxide (PVA/TiO2) nanofibers were manufactured in three different concentrations of ZnO and TiO2 NPs for the application of self-cleaning properties because metallic oxides, specifically ZnO & TiO2, have the properties to remove the contaminants by hydroxyl radical (OH−1), which degrades the contaminants into small molecules and finally into CO2 and H2O. Therefore, these composites were manufactured by electrospinning. The resultant nanofibers were characterized for morphology by scan electron microscopy (SEM) & transmission electron microscopy (TEM), chemical interactions by Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectra, crystalline structure by X-ray diffraction (XRD) spectra water absorbency was evaluated by water contact angle, self-cleaning by solar simulator, and thermal degradation was done by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) for the sake of nanoparticles the content. On the base of the characterization results it was concluded that these PVA/ZnO & PVA/TiO2 nanofibers have self cleaning properties, but PVA/ZnO nanofibers have higher self-cleaning properties than PVA/TiO2 nanofibers because PVA/ZnO nanofibers have 95% self-cleaning properties, which is higher than PVA/TiO2 nanofibers.