Electrospinnig Polystyrene/Silver Nanoparticles Nanofibrous Membrane For Water Purification

Electrospinning has acquired increasing appeal as a viable process that creates sub-micron to nano-scale fibers through an electrically charged jet of polymer solution/melt.To date,many polymers have been successfully electrospun and massive research has been carried out to gain in depth understanding of the process for better control of fiber formation.In this project,electrospun polystyrene/ silver nanoparticle nanofibrous membrane has been effectively fabricated with N-N dimethylformamide as appropriate solvent for the solution perpetration.The experiment takes place using electrospinning set-up with AC/DC high voltage power,syringe pump,needle,and aluminum substrate applied.The polystyrene/silver nanoparticle solution was loaded into 2.5 mL syringes and the woven membrane was collected with membrane support layer which located above the aluminum sheet(substrate).The height of collector and needle was adjusted to 15 cm and the voltage was adjusted to the solution spinning critical voltage,which is depended on the concentration of the samples,the concentration of polymer solution was selected to 10,12,14,16,18 and 20 mg/L %,with applied voltage set as 20.75,21.27,23.52,24.63,25.76 and 27.21 kV,respectively.The fabricated membranes were left for 24 hours to dry then it was characterized using different characterization methods,for example,scanning electron microscope(SEM)was used to measure the fiber diameter and pore size with an average fibrous diameter of 410 nm.Contact angle meter was used to calculate the degree of hydrophobicity and different contact angles were obtained depending on the sample concentrations.The performance of project was evaluated using two characteristic experiments.Firstly,we have separated bacteria through the fibrous membranes and measured the reduction of absorption density(OD).The OD was changed from 3.496 to 0.412 after filtration,and therefor membrane was shown effective separation medium.In the second experiment,we check the antibacterial property of different concentration of silver nanoparticles(2.5,5,10,20 and 50 ?M/L)and the best antibacterial property was obtained with the higher concentration of silver nanoparticles(50 ?M/L)...