Mechanical Properties of Individual Polymeric Micro and Nano Fibers using Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)

Abstract

Being the raw materials, fibers have the biggest importance in textiles industry. With the invention of the first man-made fiber, nylon, in 1930s, fiber industry gained a new aspect. During the recent years, fibers gained another aspect with the term "nanotechnology". Now, today's science is focused on the nano materials. Analyzing and finding new applications for them are some of the concerns. Textile industry is affected from the fiber part of the nanomaterials. The introduction of the nanofibers added a lot of interesting applications to textiles. Drug delivery, tissue engineering, reinforcement for composite materials, filtration are some of the interesting applications of nanofibers. Having a lot of exciting applications, nanofibers require to be examined well. However, since they are fairly small materials, it is not very easy to analyze them.

In this thesis, we aimed to develop a method to analyze mechanical properties of individual micro and nanofibers using a technique called Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). After finding a useful approach to prepare individual islands-in-the-sea form fibers for the further analysis, we also set up AFM and developed an experimental approach to examine individual PET and Nylon-6 micro and nanofibers' mechanical properties.