Optimization of Amine Grafting on Polyacrylonitrile Nanofibers Membrane using Central Composite Design

Heavy metals are considered one of the important pollutants of environment causing water contamination. Typically, adsorption is regarded as a common method to remove toxicmetal ions. Adsorption of metal ions is usually controlled by surface functional groups of adsorbents [1]. In this work, grafting of amine groups optimization on PAN microfibers and nanofibers were presented using statistical approach. Electrospinning of polyacrylonitrile solutions indimethylformamide (PAN/DMF) were performed with different concentrations. Then, electrospun nanofibers were functionalized with diethylenetriamine (DETA) under different reaction time, temperature, and fiber diameters. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) is a sequentialstatistical procedure that allows for a fewer number of runs to extract meaningful information [2,3].