An Alternative Electrospinning Approach With Varying Electric Field for 2-D-Aligned Nanofibers

Abstract

In the electrospinning process, unstructured nanofiber mats are produced by oriented fluid jets with an external electrostatic field. Electrospun fibers have wide applications for the fabrication of composite materials, tissue scaffold, and membranes. However, electrospun fiber production systems have many problems, e.g., the bending instability due to the complicated oscillations of polymer jet. In this research, parallel plate and hollow cylindrical conducting electrodes are implemented through the jet trajectory in order to investigate the possibility of controlled deposition of polymer fibers. Parallel electrodes with proper driving sources can generate the steering field for the nanofiber formation at the collector plate based on analog addressing electronics. It was shown that the modulated electric field applied through the parallel plate electrodes notably increased the deposition of the electrospun polymer fibers in a controlled fashion at the collector, which is coherent to the computer simulations. Furthermore, the finite-length hollow cylinder dampened the bending instabilities of the polymer jet which decreases the characteristic spot size of the deposited electrospun fiber to a smaller diameter.

Electrospun nanofibres to mimic natural hierarchical structure of tissues: application in musculoskeletal regeneration

“…A finite length hollow cylinder placed after the spinneret limited the bending instabilities and reduced coil formation in the jet. This set-up is followed by parallel plate electrodes which enhances the fibre alignment on the collector (Karatay et al, 2014). A very simple method based on the above principle was successful in aligning fibres with different geometries (square, rectangular, triangular, circular and semiannular) of slot collector (Rakesh, 2014).…”

Nanofiber Filaments Fabricated by a Liquid-Bath Electrospinning Method

“…Higher electrostatic field interferences increased the instability of Taylor cones and jets, and jet whipping during the electrospinning process got more complex [23]. These two behaviors would induce more irregular bends in the smooth nanofibers during flying, thereby leading to more intertwined and bent nanofibers, as shown in Figure 4a.…”

Fabricated Wavy Micro/Nanofiber via Auxiliary Electrodes in Near-Field Electrospinning

“…NFES can accurately deposit high positioned fibers by shortening the nozzle-to-collector distance; however, the generated fibers are normally straight or uncontrollable [17,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. Although auxiliary electric field has been applied to control the morphology of the fibers in the conventional electrospinning process, the major purpose of using auxiliary electric field was to align fibers [18,23,[30][31][32][33].…”