652 J. Indian Chem. Soc., Vol. 92, May 2015, pp. 652-655 Development of electrospun Ti incorporated polyvinyl pyrrollidone nanofiber and its characterizations Krishnaveni Venugopal and Sangeetha Dharmalingam* Department of Mechanical Engineering, Anna University, Guindy, Chennai-600 025, India E-mail : sangeetha@annauniv.edu Abstract : In recent years, electrospinning has garnered a lot of interest in the production of ultra fine continuous polymer fibers of varying diameters. The main goal of this study was to prepare a novel bipolar membrane using metal incorporated hydrophilic polymer nanofiber mat as an intermediate so as to investigate the effects of the hydrophilic interface on water splitting efficiency. The technique used for the nanofiber preparation is by electrospinning method and the polymer used for the nanofiber mat is polyvinyl pyrrollidone (PVP, a conducting polymer). The novelty in the work is incorporation of metal (Ti) into the nanofiber matrix during the electrospinning process itself for the enhancement of water splitting capacity. Thereby, the bonding of the metal with the nanofiber polymer matrix was stronger than obtained through any other process. This strength is directly focused towards the better efficiency in water treatment applications. The fabricated nanofiber mat was characterized using FTIR-ATR, SEM-EDAX and XRD techniques. Keywords : Electrospinning, polyvinyl pyrrollidone, Ti metal incorporated nanofiber, scanning electron microscope. Introduction Electrospinning is a broadly used electrostatic fiber fabrication technology which utilizes strong electrical forces to produce polymer fibers. Various diameters of fibers were produced ranging from 2 nm to several mi- crometers using more than 200 natural and/or synthetic polymer solutions 1 . The sub-micron range non-woven nanofibrous mats produced by this technique, offers vari- ous advantages like high surface area to volume ratio, tunable porosity and the ability to manipulate nanofiber composition in order to get desired properties and func- tion. About 50 patents have been filed in the past 60 years 2 describing various experimental methodologies with different polymer melts and solutions. This has evinced more research interest and commercial attention due to its versatility and potential for applications in diverse fields 3–6 . Bipolar membranes (BPM) usually consist of anion and cation exchange layers. Upon strong electric field, all the ionic components are removed from the BPM and then water splitting occurs at the interface resulting in protons and hydroxyl ions. Hence, therefore the BPM performance significantly depends on the interface char- acteristics. Usually electric field enhanced water disso- ciation and catalytic proton transfer reaction are employed to explain the water splitting mechanism. In this sense, many researchers have tried to enhance the water split- ting efficiency by modifying the interface properties 7–9 . From the literature, it was observed that introduction of either hydrophilic substance or metallic compounds as a water splitting catalyst at the interface considerably re- duces the water splitting voltage due to increased wetness thereby promoting water dissociation reaction in a BPM interface 10 . The present work reports on the successful prepara- tion of electrospun Ti metal incorporated polyvinyl pyrrollidone (PVP) nanofiber from its aqueous solution form. To the best of our knowledge, electrospinning of PVP from its aqueous solution have not been reported. It was expected that the enhanced hydrophilicity at the BPM interface accelerates the water splitting reaction because the hydrophilic polymer (PVP) increases the water acti- vity by attracting water from the ion exchange layers to the space charge region. The other reason for choosing this polymer system was that conducting polymers like PVP with porous structure and high surface area are of- ten considered to be useful as supporting materials for the incorporation of dispersed metal catalysts and devel-