Measuring the Diameter of Nanofibers Extracted from Polyblend Fibers Using FCM Clustering Method

Extracting two component nanofibers from blend polymers is one of the interesting methods of industrial production of nanofibers. Knowing the morphology of nanofibers structure is essential for improving their efficiency. Fiber diameter is one of the major structural properties, which is typically determined by manual measuring methods. However, manual fiber diameter calculation is a tedious and time consuming task as well as being sensitive to human errors. Therefore, an accurate and automated technique to measure the diameter of fibers is desired. In recent years, image processing methods have been commonly used to measure the diameter of nanofibers. In this study, image segmentation based on Fuzzy Clustering Method (FCM) and Distance Transform Method (DTM) was used to measure the diameter of nanofibers extracted from blend fiber. The diameter of nanofibers was calculated using proposed method and results were compared with other image processing algorithms and the manual method. The presented results showed that the FCM approach can be helpful for measuring the nanofiber diameter within a fibrous network.