MAGNETIC ELECTROSPUN COMPOSITE FIBERS

Abstract

This work is focusing on electrospinning polyethylene oxide (PEO) with incorporated barium ferrite nano-particles (BaFe) and the characterization of the magnetic properties of the obtained composites fibers. The barium ferrite powders used belong to a group of ferrites with hexagonal crystal structure. PEO has low toxicity, is water soluble, and is available in a variety of molecular weights of which 600.000 g/mol was used in this study. Following successful electrospinning of magnetic composite fibers, we have selected two samples, denoted as S1 and S2, for further investigation. The process parameters corresponding to the production of S1 and S2 differ only by the needle tip-to-collector distance which is larger for S2 (70 mm as compared to 50 mm). SEM images and fiber diameter distributions reveal that, as previously shown for pure PEO electrospun fibers, the average fiber diameter is decreasing with decreasing tip-collector distance. In addition, the distribution of the fiber diameters for the S1 sample is wider than the one for S2. This is indicative of a less controlled electrospinning process in the case of the S1 sample. Magnetic measurements on composite fibers reveal an expected ferrimagnetic behavior and no major differences between the magnetic properties of S1 and S2.

Keywords

• electrospinning
• polyethylene oxide
• barium ferrite nano-particles
• composite fibers
• magnetic properties