Abstract
Coaxial electrospinning (co-electrospinning) technique has greatly expanded the universality of fabricating core-shell polymer nanofibers. However, the effect of solution miscibility on the morphology of co-electrospun products remains unclear. Herein, different cellulose acetate (CA) solutions with high solution miscibility but distinctly different electrospinnability were used to survey the effect of solution miscibility on the co-electrospinning process. The structural characterizations show that co-electrospun products are composed of nanofibers with and without the core-shell structure. This indicates that partial solution mixing occurred during the co-electrospinning process instead of absolute no-mixing or complete mixing. Importantly, the solution miscibility also shows a significant influence on the product morphology. In particular, the transformation from nanofibers to microparticles was realized with the increase of core-to-shell flow ratio during the co-electrospinning of core electrosprayable CA/dimethylacetamide (DMAc) solution and shell electrospinnable CA/acetone-DMAc (2/1, v/v) solution. Results show that the solution miscibility exerts a significant effect on not only the formation of core-shell structure but also the product morphology. This work provides a new insight for the in-depth understanding of the co-electrospinning process.
Highlights
Accepted: 14 December 2021Electrospinning and electrospray are kindred electrohydrodynamic (EHD) techniques to produce ultrafine polymer fibers and particles [1,2], and have been extended to various fields such as nanosensors [3], drug delivery [4], tissue engineering [5], energy [6] and environment [7] applications
In the past two decades, newly developed coaxial electrospinning/electrospray techniques have greatly expanded the universality of fabricating polymer fibers/particles with complex structures [10,11,12]
In a typical co-electrospinning process, the electrostatic forces focused on the shell fluid drive the core and shell fluids to form a core-shell compound Taylor cone [10,20]
Summary
Accepted: 14 December 2021Electrospinning and electrospray are kindred electrohydrodynamic (EHD) techniques to produce ultrafine polymer fibers and particles [1,2], and have been extended to various fields such as nanosensors [3], drug delivery [4], tissue engineering [5], energy [6] and environment [7] applications. A continuous electrified jet is ejected from the tip of a Taylor cone, and subsequently solidified into fibers. In the past two decades, newly developed coaxial electrospinning/electrospray (co-electrospinning/co-electrospray) techniques have greatly expanded the universality of fabricating polymer fibers/particles with complex structures [10,11,12]. In these processes, dissimilar solutions are usually delivered into different channels of a coaxial multichannel spinneret to achieve various structures, such as core-shell [13,14], hollow [15,16], multichannel [17], multiwall [18] or wire-in-tube [19] structures.
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