AAAR 31st Annual Conference
October 8-12, 2012
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Multi-jet Electrospinning with High-Throughput Using a Coaxial Grooved Nozzle and Two Fluids
INYONG PARK, Woojin Kim, Sang Soo Kim, KAIST
Abstract Number: 229 Working Group: Nanoparticles and Materials Synthesis
Abstract Electrospinning is a simple and versatile technique for fabricating nanofibers and fibrous mats, capable of producing continuous nanofibers with various types of surface morphology. Because of its numerous advantages, the procedure has been widely employed with variety of polymers in various applications.Nevertheless, despite its simple methodology and promising array of applications, the development of electrospinning has been hampered by extremely low throughput, which is usually only about a few milliliters per hour. It is not easy to increase the throughput, simply because the flow rate is one of the most sensitive processing parameters in electrospinning. To broaden the applications of the electrospinning technique, high throughput is one of the primary goals of many researchers. To overcome the throughput limitation, we have introduced coaxial grooved nozzles. By using a coaxial grooved nozzle and two fluids, including polyethylene oxide (PEO), we are able to achieve stable multi-jet operation and relatively high throughput. The multi-jets are initiated by the multi-jet mode of the inner fluid, and share the total flow rate of the polymer solution. We have investigated the operating conditions for various flow rate combinations of two fluids. The morphology of the resulting nanofibers is uniform without bead formation. The fibers have an average diameter of about 350 nm.