A continuous process to align electrospun nanofibers into parallel and crossed arrays
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RESEARCH PAPER
A continuous process to align electrospun nanofibers into parallel and crossed arrays Michael J. Laudenslager • Wolfgang M. Sigmund
Received: 26 October 2012 / Accepted: 5 February 2013 / Published online: 27 March 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract Electrical, optical, and mechanical properties of nanofibers are strongly affected by their orientation. Electrospinning is a nanofiber processing technique that typically produces nonwoven meshes of randomly oriented fibers. While several alignment techniques exist, they are only able to produce either a very thin layer of aligned fibers or larger quantities of fibers with less control over their alignment and orientation. The technique presented herein fills the gap between these two methods allowing one to produce thick meshes of highly oriented nanofibers. In addition, this technique is not limited to collection of fibers along a single axis. Modifications to the basic setup allow collection of crossed fibers without stopping and repositioning the apparatus. The technique works for a range of fiber sizes. In this study, fiber diameters ranged from 100 nm to 1 micron. This allows a few fibers at a
Special Issue Editors: Candace S.-J. Tsai, Michael J. Ellenbecker This article is part of the Topical Collection on Nanotechnology, Occupational and Environmental Health M. J. Laudenslager W. M. Sigmund (&) Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-6400, USA e-mail: [email protected] W. M. Sigmund WCU Department of Energy Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul 133-791, Republic of Korea
time to rapidly deposit in alternating directions creating an almost woven structure. These aligned nanofibers have the potential to improve the performance of energy storage and thermoelectric devices and hold great promise for directed cell growth applications. Keywords Electrospinning Alignment Crossbars Nanofiber fabrication
Introduction The versatility of electrospinning allows formation of nanofibers from nearly any soluble polymer as well as many ceramic precursors and composite materials (Ramakrishna et al. 2006; Subbiah et al. 2005; Teo and Ramakrishna 2006; Huang et al. 2003; Sigmund et al. 2006). The technique produces nanofibers from electrically charged, viscous solution. In this process, an advancement pump generates a droplet on the tip of a syringe. By applying a potential difference between the needle and a target, the droplet deforms into a Taylor cone. From the elongated droplet, a liquid jet emerges and accelerates toward a target with lower electrostatic potential, positioned several centimeters away. Instabilities in the electric field cause the fiber to undergo a whipping motion which thins the fiber and causes it to deposit randomly in a mesh. Further details on electrospinning can be found in numerous other studies (Fridrikh et al. 2003; Hohman et al. 2001; Rutledge and Fridrikh 2007).
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Development of methods to align electrospun nanofibers
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