Abstract
Secondary surface texture is of great significance to morphological variety and further expands the application areas of electrospun nanofibers. This paper presents the possibility of directly electrospinning grooved polystyrene (PS) fibers using both single and binary solvent systems. Solvents were classified as low boiling point solvent (LBPS): dichloromethane (DCM), acetone (ACE), and tetrahydrofuran (THF); high boiling point solvent (HBPS): N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF) and cyclohexanone (CYCo); and non-solvent (NS): 1-butanol (BuOH). By the systematic selection and combination of these solvents at given parameters, we found that single solvent systems produced non-grooved fibers. LBPS/DMF solvent systems resulted in fibers with different grooved textures, while LBPS/CYCo led to fibers with double grooved texture. Grooved fibers can also be fabricated from LBPS/LBPS, NS/LBPS, and NS/HBPS systems under specific conditions. The results indicated that the difference of evaporation rate (DER) between the two solvents played a key role in the formation of grooved texture. The formation of this unique texture should be attributed to three separate mechanisms, namely void-based elongation, wrinkle-based elongation, and collapsed jet-based elongation. Our findings can serve as guidelines for the preparation of ultrafine fibers with grooved secondary texture.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s11671-015-0949-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Electrospinning is a versatile nanofiber production technique using electrical force to stretch a charged polymer solution jet coupled with solvent evaporation and subsequent harvesting of solidified or semi-solidified nanofibers [1, 2]
We investigated the effect of solvent systems using both single and binary solvent systems
Solvents involved can be classified as low boiling point solvent (LBPS): DCM, ACE, and THF; high boiling point solvent (HBPS): DMF and CYCo; and non-solvent (NS): BuOH
Summary
Electrospinning is a versatile nanofiber production technique using electrical force to stretch a charged polymer solution jet coupled with solvent evaporation and subsequent harvesting of solidified or semi-solidified nanofibers [1, 2]. Electrospun nanofibers are gaining increasing attention due to their distinct properties such as high specific surface area, ease of functionality, variety of morphology and structure, and high porosity and interconnected pores of their assembled nonwovens, which allow them to be investigated and applied to various areas, such as tissue engineering [3, 4], sensors [5], filtration [6,7,8], and self-cleaning surfaces [9, 10]. Lin et al [12] found that the specific surface of polystyrene (PS) fibers electrospun from 5 wt.%. It has been demonstrated [13,14,15] that the performance was dramatically improved when porous fibers were employed as absorption materials. Jiang et al [10] reported that lotus-leaf-like superhydrophobic surfaces with water contact angles (CA)
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