Preparation and characterization of polymer based catalyst support material by using electrospinning technique

The electrospinning technique has been a popular technique recently used in the preparation of polymer nanofibers. Since the diameters of polymer fibers formed in this way are in the range of 100-1000 nm, the surface area obtained is high enough when coated a catalyst material with a suitable technique. The polymer fibers produced by this method are promising to increase the activity of the visible region photocatalysts. In this study, nanofibers were prepared by using different polymers and their usability as a photocatalyst support material was compared. For this purpose, magnetron sputtering method, which the number of studies using this technique in the literature is negligible, was used to fix the catalyst to the fiber surfaces. In the study, the selection of polymers in different natures has been done and the optimization of the important parameters of electrospinning has been realized. Fiber diameters were reduced between 100-500 nm by employing optimized parameters. In order to test the usability of the obtained nanofibers as catalyst support material, Fe2O3 and Cu2O visible region photocatalysts were fixed by using the sputtering technique and the methylene blue dye decolorization kinetics were studied.