31^st Materials Science and Engineering Conference: Advancement & Innovations

Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) fiber is used in the textile industry frequently and has a prominent place among the synthetic fibers. It has good thermal stability, compatibility with polar materials due to containing the high polar nitrile groups, hardness and high abrasion resistance. However, in spite of many superior properties of PAN fibers, some of their poor features such as low moisture absorption and poor antistatic properties limit their further usage. So, surface modification is particularly important for fiber/fabric materials and in order to modify the surface of PAN fiber, functional monomers can be incorporated into fiber structure. One of the most used methods for this purpose, the graft copolymerization method was used to graft Hydroxyethyl Methacrylate (HEMA) onto PAN fiber directly to get the surface modified fibers. The grafting processes were carried out in the aqueous medium containing benzoyl peroxide solution in acetone as initiator and HEMA solution at suitable concentrations. PAN fibers grafted HEMA at different percentages was prepared to depend on the polymerization conditions such as initiator and monomer concentration, polymerization temperature. Grafting yield was determined gravimetrically and the maximum grafting yield was obtained as about 90% under the conditions investigated. The chemical structure of PAN fiber-g-poly (hydroxyethyl methacrylate) was characterized by FTIR and H-NMR spectroscopic techniques. The surface morphology of the grafted fiber was studied by SEM.