The charge effect of cationic surfactants on the elimination of fibre beads in the electrospinning of polystyrene

Abstract

Polystyrene nanofibres were electrospun with the inclusion of cationic surfactants ， dodecyltrimethylammonium bromide (DTAB) or tetrabutylammonium chloride (TBAC), in the polymer solution. A small amount of cationic surfactant effectively stopped the formation of beaded fibres during the electrospinning. The cationic surfactants were also found to improve the solution conductivity, but had no effect on the viscosity. Only DTAB had an effect on the surface tension of the polymer solution, the surface tension decreasing slightly with an increase in the concentration of DTAB. The formation of beaded fibres was attributed to an insufficient stretch of the filaments during the whipping of jet, due to a low charge density. Adding the cationic surfactants improved the net charge density that enhanced the whipping instability. The jet was stretched under stronger charge repulsion and at a higher speed, resulting in an exhaustion of the bead structure. In addition, a polymer/surfactant interaction was found in the

Fabrication of Electrospun Antibacterial Curcumin-loaded Zein Nanofibers

“…The optical densities of bacterial solutions were used to evaluate the antibacterial activity of the CLZNFs against the common bacterium Staphylococus aureus (Gram positive; ATCC 6538; S. aureus). 28 The bacterial suspensions were prepared as follows: 100 µL of bacterial solution containing 10 8 colony-forming units per milliliter (CFU/ mL) was diluted to 10 5 (CFU/mL) in Difco TM nutrient broth solution. A 50 mg fragment of the CLZNF mats was introduced into 5 mL of the diluted bacterial solution.…”

“…18 T. Lin et al also prepared polystyrene nanofibers containing surfactants and observed that surfactants can stop bead formation and lead to thinner fibers. 28 In this study, electrospun CLZNFs were fabricated for application in antibacterial nonwoven zein mats. Surfactant Tween 80 was used to encapsulate the curcumin into micelles in order to increase the bioavailability of the curcumin when it was released into phosphate-buffered saline (PBS).…”

Perspectives of Chitin and Chitosan Nanofibrous Scaffolds in Tissue Engineering

“…Chitosan can be used as a thickener to improve the rheological properties of an aq solution to be electrospun because chitosan is compatible with other biocompatible polymers such as PVA (Miya et al, 1994;Zheng et al, 2001), PEO (Yilmaz et al, 2003) etc. A common defect observed when electrospinning is the formation of beads, to counter this, additives such as salts (Fong et al, 1999) or surfactants (Lin et al, 2004) are added. Alternatively, the addition of cationic and anionic polyelectrolytes (Son et al, 2004) would also increase the conductivity of a solution and thus decrease fiber diameter.…”

Optimisation of electrospinning parameter for Poly(L-lactic) acid (PLLA) electrospun nanofiber

“…Although electrospinning of PLLA polymers has been reported by others in a range of studies [4,14,20,26], it is clear that using a different apparatus and working conditions such as environment will lead to different fibre morphologies, in addition to any changes in processing conditions. In this research, the PLLA polymer was electrospun and optimization of the processing parameters were performed so that the electospun fibres achieve the surface morphology that is beadless and is of a sub-micron diameter size.…”