Coaxial mechano‐electrospinning of oriented fibers with core‐shell structure for tactile sensing

Abstract

AbstractCoaxial electrospinning is an effective technique to produce core‐shell fibers. Nevertheless, it is unable to realize accurate positioning of the fibers in two dimensions which limits its use in the field of high oriented and aligned structures over large area such as flexible tactile sensors. Here, we introduce the Mechano‐electrospinning, in which drawing force coming from moving substrate and electric static force are used to manipulate the fiber controllable into the traditional coaxial electrospinning to form a new method named coaxial Mechano‐electrospinning which can continuously direct‐write oriented core‐shell fiber with high deposition accuracy. This method uses a coaxial convex needle and a two dimensional moving collector to deposit core‐shell fibers by near‐field localization and mechanical drawing force. A series of experiments were performed to determine optimum process parameters and results showed that with the substrate moving speed of 50–200 mm/s, voltage of 5–6.5 kV and the tip‐collector distance of 20–50 mm, core‐shell fibers can be continuously deposited and well oriented. Additionally, a pressure sensor based on the core‐shell fibers was developed and exhibited good dynamic sensitivity in the range of 0.5–50 Hz.