Precision electrospinning

Functions and applications Nanofibers Nonwovens Precision electrospinning... 

Under normal electrospinning conditions, the deposition area of an electrospinning jet can be undesirably large and difficult to predict. This can lead to difficulties in precise and repeatable fabrication of uniform nanofiber arrays, and materials may be wasted. It is desirable to explore methods to control the deposition of an electrospinning jet in terms of both focused fiber deposition area and controlled placement of the fiber deposition area. The range of fiber deposition is usually decreased as the needle-to-collector distance is decreased however, this alone may... 

A typical apparatus for electrospinning of polymers consists of a nozzle, a high-voltage power supply, a container for polymer fluid, and an electrode collector of an injection pump with a hypodermic syringe (Fig. 1.2]. The solution is pumped through the needle/ nozzle, a grounded collector that can be either stationary or rotating. Experiments can also be carried out in a box in order to precisely control environmental conditions such as temperature and relative humidity. 

Ink jet printing is a drop deposition technique, which results in precise patterns. Electrospinning, on the other hand, is a fibre deposition technique where a continuous fibre mat, or fibre assembly, may be deposited to cover a specified area. Electrospun films are highly porous and it is possible to fabricate them with a preferred fibre orientation and, hence, anisotropic properties. 

Electrospinning is a facile method for making precision nanofibres and microfibres that can be used to replicate native extracellular matrix (ECM) fibrils. 

Timely recent developments in melt electrospinning make it possible to potentially fabricate fibrous webs and networks with precise fibre diameters and patterning and thus provide fibrous architectures for cell integration and re-assembly into organized tissue. Our innovative approach is to use polysaccharides in the fibre composition to deliver useful encapsulates and form better biological associations than currently used polymers. We therefore propose to use melt electrospun... 

We recently reported on a method to prepare conducting-polymer nanombes that can be used for precisely-controlled drug release [7]. As shown in Figure 14.5, the fabrication process involves the electrospinning of a biodegradable polymer (here poly(lactide-co-glycohde)... 

Wu H, Sun Y, Lin D, Zhong R, Zhang C, Pan W (2009) GaN nanofibers based on electrospinning facile synthesis, controlled assembly, precise doping, and application as high performance UV photodetector. Adv Mater 21(2) 227-231. doi 10.1002/adma.200800529... 

Electrospinning is considered to be a straightforward and multifunctional technique to produce ultrafine fibers with diameters in the range of nano to micrometers (Zhao et al., 2015a Bonvallet et al 2015). In addition, cells can be seeded and biomolecules incorporated within 3D scaffolds in a precise order to produce a functional multilayer material (Pereira et al., 2013 Lin et al., 2015 Mahjour et al., 2015 Yanez et al., 2015). 

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