Production and characterization of metal oxide doped nanofiber

As a result of the misuse of antibiotics, drug resistant bacteria strains have been emerged and arise as a life-threatening problem. Because of this reason, development of new materials that have antibacterial properties is still seen as an important topic. With the ever-increasing development of nanotechnology, nanomaterials are started to gain importance for the bacterial infection control research. Nanostructured materials can show strong antibacterial activity with the prevention of bacterial growth, and therefore, is a newly developing topic in the health industry. Nowadays, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) is one of the most used biomaterials with the help of its hydrophilic, biocompatible, and non-toxic properties. In the studies, because of the advantage of wider surface area with the use of PVA nanofibers, therefore allowing cells to proliferate more easily, PVA nanofibers can find more widespread use in the field of biomaterials. Because of its three-dimensional structure, PVA nanofibers have positive effects on cell proliferation and cell growth, and therefore, have a field of use in the tissue engineering applications for building or repairing of tissue scaffold varieties. Besides, usage of PVA nanofibers is becoming more widespread in the field as wound dressing, tissue scaffold, controlled drug release, membranes and soft tissue applications. Because of the low cost of production and easy to do application of polymer-based nanofibers, electrospinning process is mostly used. In the electrospinning process, nanofibers are obtained by applying voltage between the polymer solution and the counter-collector. In this thesis, it is aimed to produce metal oxide added PVA nanofibers, which are expected to show antibacterial properties. In this context, PVA nanofibers has been produced by the electrospinning process with the molybdenum oxide (MoO3) addition. Firstly, particle size analysis of the MoO3 particles and viscosity analysis of the prepared solutions for the electrospinning has been done. Subsequently, SEM analysis is achieved to determine the morphological characterization of samples. Besides, for the structural analysis of the samples, EDS, FTIR and XRD analysis have been performed. In the last part, after the heat treatment, bioactivity test in SBF to determine the in vitro properties is carried out and disc diffusion and colony forming measurement methods is performed to determine the antibacterial properties. According to obtained results, it was determined that MoO3 additive had positive effect on antibacterial properties of nanofibers.