Significance of nano-silver coating on the thermal behavior of parent and modified agro-waste coir fibers

Abstract

In the present study, silver nanoparticles were coated on different coir fibers to see their improvements in thermal behavior against the raw coir fiber. The fibers taken for the study are raw coir, parent coir (PC), modified coir-1 (MC1), modified coir-2 (MC2), silver nanoparticles (AgNPs)-coated PC and MC fibers. All the fibers were subjected to FESEM along with line scans of EDS, thermo gravimetry, differential thermal gravimetry and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analyses to observe the size of AgNPs and their responses to thermal behaviors, respectively. FESEM along with line scans of EDS shows the size of AgNPs varies from 40 to 210 nm in the coated fiber. The temperature of degradation (T-f (degrees C)) of AgNPs-coated coir increases significantly compared to PC and MCs. DTA and DSC analyses indicate higher thermal stability of silver-coated fibers over PC and MCs. In general, all the fibers show higher thermal stability over raw fiber and when coated fibers were compared, the thermal stabilities follow the order MC2 > MC1 > PC. It was also found that increase in the concentration of silver during coating further increases the thermal stability in all the cases without changing the order. [GRAPHICS] .