Electrospinning of polyvinyl alcohol into crosslinked nanofibers: An approach to fabricate functional adsorbent for heavy metals

Electrospun nanofibers have a wide range of applications due to their unique miniature size and accompanying ultra-high specific surface area. Polyvinyl alcohol(PVA) is a kind of hydrophilic materials, and hence its nanofiber morphology prepared by electrospinning disappeared after solution immersing. In the present work, crosslinked PVA nanofibers were prepared by electrospinning and then employing glutaraldehyde vapor crosslinking to improve their water resistance and mechanical properties. As an application, these nanofibers were used to adsorb Cu2+ and Pb2+ according to varying crosslinking time and different concentrations of ionic solution. It was observed the crosslinked PVA nanofiber films maintained good fiber morphology after adsorption, while the nanofiber morphology of uncrosslinked samples was lost. The stability of the crosslinked nanofiber films in water was improved, the adsorption equilibrium time of Pb2+ decreased from 30 h to 10 h while the equilibrium adsorption time of Cu2+ decreased from 15 h to 5 h, and the tensile strength of the nanofiber films with crosslinking time of 20 h was 7.99 MPa, which was 240% higher than that of the nanofiber with crosslinking time of 1 h, indicating higher efficiency.