Abstract
Electrospinning can be used to create nanofiber mats for diverse applications, from wound dressings and tissue engineering to filters for medical and biotechnological applications. In most of these applications, it is necessary to fix the nanofiber mat on a macroscopic textile fabric, on another nanofiber mat or within a frame to keep it at the desired position. Due to their extremely low thickness and areal mass, however, nanofiber mats are easily destroyed by sewing, and in several situations glued bonds are too thick and not flexible enough. Here we report on ultrasonic welding of polyacrylonitrile nanofiber mats, suggesting this method as a joining process without destruction of the mat morphology for thermoplastic nanofiber mats. A variety of welding patterns results in different adhesion forces between both joined nanofiber mats and different failure mechanisms, with some welding patterns enabling bonding stronger than the mats themselves. Our findings show that ultrasonic welding is a possible joining method for polyacrylonitrile nanofiber mats.
Highlights
Electrospinning enables production of nanofiber mats with fiber diameters between around ten nanometers and several micrometers
While most electrospinning instruments use a needle through which a polymer solution or melt is pressed by a syringe, needleless technologies typically place the polymer solution or melt on a wire or a rotating cylinder
These results show that while most ultrasonic welding seams have too low maximum forces to seam rupture to be used for reliable connections of nanofiber mats, carefully choosing the optimum combination of anvil wheel–i.e., welding pattern–and pressure on the nanofiber mats may result in sufficient seam strengths
Summary
Electrospinning enables production of nanofiber mats with fiber diameters between around ten nanometers and several micrometers. While most electrospinning instruments use a needle through which a polymer solution or melt is pressed by a syringe, needleless technologies typically place the polymer solution or melt on a wire or a rotating cylinder In both cases, a strong electric field drags the polymer solution to an oppositely charged electrode which is shielded by a substrate on which the resulting fibers are placed, building a nanofiber mat there. A strong electric field drags the polymer solution to an oppositely charged electrode which is shielded by a substrate on which the resulting fibers are placed, building a nanofiber mat there In this way, nanofiber mats with a high surface: volume ratio and high porosity are created. They can be produced from diverse biopolymers [10,11,12,13], man-made polymers [14,15,16] or blends with other materials [17,18,19]
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