Control of PVA Nanofiber Alignment via Variation of Collector Plate Distance in the Electrospinning Process
Anjar Taufik Hidayat1, Nur Afifah Zen2, Yulian Zetta Maulana2, Ahmad Kusumaatmaja3

1. Department of Physics, Universitas Indonesia. *anjar.taufik[at]ui.ac.id
2. Department of Telecommunication Engineering, Universitas Telkom.
3. Department of Physics, Universitas Gadjah Mada.

Abstract

Poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) nanofibers were successfully fabricated using the electrospinning technique to investigate the effect of collector configuration on fiber alignment. A 15 wt.% PVA solution in distilled water was electrospun at an applied voltage of 15 kV for 3 minutes, with a tip-to-collector distance of 12 cm. SEM image analysis showed that the resulting nanofibers had an average diameter of 433 nm. To control fiber orientation, a collector consisting of two parallel copper plates (each 10 cm in length) was used, with the inter-plate distance varied from 2 to 7 cm. The degree of nanofiber alignment was analyzed using ImageJ and quantified by the nematic order parameter. The results indicate that fiber alignment decreases with increasing inter-plate distance, with nematic order parameter values of 0.96, 0.91, 0.90, 0.90, 0.86, and 0.83 for samples with plate distances of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 cm, respectively. These findings demonstrate that highly aligned nanofibers can be fabricated by employing relatively small inter-plate distances in the collector configuration.

Keywords: Electrospinning, Poly(vinyl alcohol), Nanofiber alignment, Parallel collector plate

Topic: Material Physics