Abstract
Regardless the low production rate, electrospinning remains the attractive technique for the nanofibers production in various fields. Thus, the development of a multi-jet technologies for electrospinning gives an opportunity to scale up and increase throughput of the fibers production. However, the multi-jet electrospinning technologies exhibit one major drawback– electrostatic mutual jet repulsion issue. In present research, we propose air blow-assisted multi-jet electrospinning system allowing production of nanofibers with yield, at least, tenfold higher than single jet electrospinning. The system produces nanofibers in two modes: multi-jet electrospinning and blow-assisted multi-jet electrospinning. In case of the latter, the application of sheath air stream allows the system to overcome the electrostatic mutual repulsion issue. These lead to the reduction of deviation of the polymer solution jets, the reduction of instabilities of the jets and the improvement of the control of the nanofibers deposition. Nanofibers morphology and size were investigated based on the scanning electron microscope micrographs. The comparison of the two modes shows changes in nanofibers morphology from beaded structure to fine nanofibers, and the slight increase in fiber mean size when the blowing assistance was applied to the process.
Highlights
The main limitation of electrospinning process is a low nanofibers production rate
Mutual electrostatic repulsion of polymeric jets in multi-jet electrospinning (MES) is one of the main drawbacks of this technique. It affects the stability of the process and uniformity of produced nanofibrous mats, as well as the area of the collector covered by the product in the process, which can generate product loss
The area of the nanofibrous mat collected in the blow-assisted multi-jet electrospun process is from about 33% to about 42% lower comparing to the product of the multi-jet electrospinning process
Summary
The main limitation of electrospinning process is a low nanofibers production rate. The electrospinning allows to produce ultrafine nanofibers with rates sufficient enough to conduct experiments. It means that using polymer solution feed rate in the range from about 0.2 ml∙h−1 to about 2 ml∙h−1 in a single-jet electrospinning system fibers can be produced with a rate from about 0.01 to about 0.1 g∙h−1 [2, 3]. Even though the industrial application of the electrospinning is limited, nanofibrous structures generated by this technology gathered attention of specialists from various fields, for instance filtration [4, 5], chemical catalysis [6, 7], electronics and energy storage [8, 9], tissue engineering [10,11,12], and the like
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