Abstract
Electrospinning is a versatile technique to produce nanofibrous membranes with applications in filtration, biosensing, biomedical and tissue engineering. The structural and therefore physical properties of electrospun fibers can be finely tuned by changing the electrospinning parameters. The large parameter window makes it challenging to optimize the properties of fibers for a specific application. Therefore, a fundamental understanding of the multiscale structure of fibers and its correlation with their macroscopic behaviors is required for the design and production of systems with dedicated applications. In this study, we demonstrate that the properties of poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoro propylene) (PVDF-HFP) electrospun fibers can be tuned by changing the rotating drum speed used as a collector during electrospinning. Indeed, with the help of multiscale characterization techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), and wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS), we observe that increasing the rotating drum speed not only aligns the fibers but also induces polymeric chain rearrangements at the molecular scale. Such changes result in enhanced mechanical properties and an increase of the piezoelectric β-phase of the PVDF-HFP fiber membranes. We detect nanostructural deformation behaviors when the aligned fibrous membrane is uniaxially stretched along the fiber alignment direction, while an increase in the alignment of the fibers is observed for randomly aligned samples. This was analyzed by performing in situ SAXS measurements coupled with uniaxial tensile loading of the fibrous membranes along the fiber alignment direction. The present study shows that fibrous membranes can be produced with varying degrees of fiber orientation, piezoelectric β-phase content, and mechanical properties by controlling the speed of the rotating drum collector during the fiber production. Such aligned fiber membranes have potential applications for neural or musculoskeletal tissue engineering.
Highlights
Fiber membranes have gained ample attention of researchers in recent times as a scaffold for tissue engineering applications due to their abilities to mimic the extracellular matrix of natural tissues more accurately than macro- or micro-scale biomaterials.[9,10,11,12]
In this study, we present the effect of the highspeed rotating drum on the mm–nm–Ascale structural changes and their correlation with the mechanical and piezoelectric properties of the PVDF-HFP membranes
The parameters for the electrospinning of PVDF-HFP were optimized in our previous study.[30]
Summary
Electrospinning is a simple, and cost-effective method to produce ber membranes for various applications such as ltration, drug delivery, biosensing, and tissue engineering due to the inherent advantages of a high surface-to-volume ratio and high porosity.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] Fiber membranes have gained ample attention of researchers in recent times as a scaffold for tissue engineering applications due to their abilities to mimic the extracellular matrix of natural tissues more accurately than macro- or micro-scale biomaterials.[9,10,11,12] For example, aligned ber membranes have shown promising response for neural and musculoskeletal tissue engineering as aligned bers signi cantly induce neurite outgrowth and promote cell migration compared to randomly oriented ber membranes.[13,14,15,16,17,18,19] scaffolds for neural and musculoskeletal tissue engineering require the optimization of the degree of ber alignment, a piezoelectric response, and good mechanical properties.[13,14,17,20,21]It is well known that the various parameters of the electrospinning process such as the applied potential difference, the type of sample collector, the needle diameter, the needle to collector distance, the ow rate and the environmental conditions critically in uence ber properties.[11,22,23,24] This brings various possibilities to steer and tailor electrospun ber membranes for the required application.[11]. Paper such a large parameter window and their nonlinear dependance on the morphology and properties of the bers makes electrospinning a challenging process for obtaining the desired properties.[25,26] the understanding of the multiscale structure–property relationship is essential to steer the properties of electrospun brous membranes accurately
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