Fabrication and Characterization of Conducting PANI Nanofibers via Electrospinning

Abstract

In this work, conducting polyaniline (PANI) nanofibers were fabricated by electrospinning technique. PANI (emeraldine-based) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) were used as the starting precursors for electrospinning technique and their concentrations were kept at 0.01 and 0.08 g/ml respectively. The effects of electrospinning conditions including volume ratio of polymer solution, operating voltage and injection rate at constant electrospinning distance on the morphologies and size distribution of the fibers were investigated. Scanning electronmicroscopy (SEM) and Fourier transforms infrared (FT-IR) were utilized to characterize morphologies and physical properties of the fibers. The optimized conditions with PVA:PANI (27;3, v/v), 20 kV voltage, 0.8 ml/hr injection rate to fabricate well-defined PVA/PANI nanofibers was acknowledged.