Novel, Facile, Single-Step Technique of Polymer/TiO2 Nanofiber Composites Membrane for Photodegradation of Methylene Blue

Novel photocatalyst membrane materials were successfully fabricated by an air jet spinning (AJS) technique from polyvinyl acetate (PVAc) solutions containing nanoparticles (NPs) of titanium dioxide (TiO2). Our innovative strategy for the production of composite nanofibers is based on stretching a solution of polymer with a high-speed compressed air jet. This enabled us to rapidly cover different substrates with TiO2/PVAc interconnected nanofibers. Surprisingly, the diameters of the as-spun fibers were found to decrease with increasing amount of NPs. Our results showed that AJS PVAc-based fibrous membranes with average fiber diameters of 505-901 nm have an apparent porosity of about 79-93% and a mean pore size of 1.58-5.12 mu m. Embedding NPs onto the as-spun fibers resulted in increasing the tensile strength of the obtained composite fiber mats. The photodegradation property of TiO2 membrane mats proved a high efficiency in the decomposition of methylene blue dye. The novel fiber spinning technique discussed in this paper can provide the capacity to lace together a variety of types of polymers, fibers and particles to produce interconnected fibers layer. Our approach, therefore, opens the door for the innovation in nanocomposite mat that has great potential as efficient and economic water filter media and as reusable photocatalyst.