Self-Cleaning Properties of Electrospun PVA/TiO₂ and PVA/ZnO Nanofibers Composites

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.