An Image Processing Technique to Quantify NanofillerLoading Accuracy in Nanocomposites

The morphology of nanocomposite polymer materials should be homogeneous throughout the entire polymermatrix. In the present research, an image processing technique is proposed in order to quantify the homogeneity of nanosilver loading in poly(sodium acrylate)-based nanocomposites. For this purpose, nanocomposites with differentloadings were synthesized and then, scanning electron microscope (SEM) images were taken. After converting the images to a black and white image (i.e., for noise elimination and thresholding), every image was converted to a matrixof zeroes and ones using a Matlab™ code, i.e., zero if the selected point is black (polymer matrix) and one if the point is white (nanofiller). The total number of ones over the total number of elements gives the loading percent ofnanofiller in the selected SEM image which should reflect the amount of nanofiller added to the polymer based on the predetermined formulation.

کلیدواژه ها:

morphology ، nanocomposite ، nanofiller loading ، scanning electron microscope (SEM)