A novel technique for measurement of electrospun nanofiber

In electrospinning, fiber diameter is an important structural characteristic because it directly affects the properties of the produced webs. In this chapter, we have developed an image analysis based method called direct tracking for measuring electrospun fiber diameter. In order to evaluate its accuracy, samples with known characteristics have been generated using a simulation scheme known as μ-randomness. To verify the applicability of the method, some real webs obtained from electrospinning of PVA have been used. Due to the need of binary input images, micrographs of the real webs obtained from scanning electron microscopy were segmented using local thresholding. The method was compared with the distance transform method. Results obtained by direct tracking were significantly better than distance transform, indicating that the method could be used successfully for measuring electrospun fiber diameter.