Abstract
While electrospinning has been widely employed to spin nanofibers, its low production rate has limited its potential for industrial applications. Comparing with electrospinning, centrifugal spinning technology is a prospective method to fabricate nanofibers with high productivity. In the current study, key parameters of the centrifugal spinning system, including concentration, rotational speed, nozzle diameter and nozzle length, were studied to control fiber diameter. An empirical model was established to determine the final diameters of nanofibers via controlling various parameters of the centrifugal spinning process. The empirical model was validated via fabrication of carboxylated chitosan (CCS) and polyethylene oxide (PEO) composite nanofibers. DSC and TGA illustrated that the thermal properties of CCS/PEO nanofibers were stable, while FTIR-ATR indicated that the chemical structures of CCS and PEO were unchanged during composite fabrication. The empirical model could provide an insight into the fabrication of nanofibers with desired uniform diameters as potential biomedical materials. This study demonstrated that centrifugal spinning could be an alternative method for the fabrication of uniform nanofibers with high yield.
Highlights
Chitosan is a natural polymer that has been widely studied for tissue engineering, due to its excellent biodegradable properties, antibacterial abilities and hemostasis properties [1,2,3,4]
It illustrated that fiber diameter increased with increasing concentration, nozzle diameter and nozzle length, respectively, while the fiber diameter decreased with increasing rotational speed
Increasing rotational speed resulted in faster jet velocity and larger air flow; both jet stretching speed and solvent evaporation rate increased; fiber could be thinner because jet can be stretched thinner and more solvent evaporated before solidification [37]
Summary
Chitosan is a natural polymer that has been widely studied for tissue engineering, due to its excellent biodegradable properties, antibacterial abilities and hemostasis properties [1,2,3,4]. Toxic or dilute acidic solutions, such as chloroform [5,6], acetic acid [7], or 1,1,1,3,3,3,-hexafluoro2-propanol (HFIP) [8] were used as solvents to make chitosan solution. Spinning pure or high percentage of continuous bead-free chitosan nanofibers is extremely difficult [12]. Maintaining a high percentage of chitosan in nanofiber scaffold is important in tissue regeneration as the antibacterial properties of composite nanofibers mainly rely on chitosan. 11,tissue important regeneration as the antibacterial properties of composite nanofibers mainly of rely on chitosan. Alternatively, centrifugal spinning is an ideal method to combine the advantages of needle and centrifugal spinning is an ideal method to combine the advantages of needle and needleless needleless electrospinnings, so as touniform produceand uniform and aligned nanofibers high [27,30,31]. The diameter and alignment are and collected the collector, as shown as in shown
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