Evaluation of Surface Roughness of Polyacrylonitrile Nanowebs

Document Type : Research Paper

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Abstract

The objective of this research work is to evaluate the surface roughness of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanowebs. For this purpose the nanowebs have been prepared in different concentrations of PAN solution from 11 to 15% (by wt). Surface roughness of nanowebs was evaluated by entropy algorithm (ENT) as well as atomic force microscopy (AFM) and then the results of two methods have been compared. To evaluate surface roughness using AFM, four roughness parameters such as maximum height, ten point height, arithmetic mean of roughness (AMR), and root mean square were measured and AMR parameter was used as surface roughness. Based on the results obtained, the increase in concentration of PAN solution from 11 to 15% (by wt) would increase nanofiber diameter from 195 to 524 nm. The results obtained from two methods show that increasing the fiber diameters of nanowebs lead to the enhancement of surface roughness of samples. The correlation coefficient of surface roughness obtained from these two methods and nanofibers diameter is more than 0.90. Statistical analysis shows that there is a good agreement of surface roughness between the two methods.

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