Journal article
Developments in melt-electrospinning of thermoplastic polymers
Polymer preprints, Vol.44(2)
01 Sep 2003
Abstract
For several years, there has been a tremendous interest in the field of electrospinning. Electrospinning is a process capable of producing sub-micron to nanosize fibers by utilizing an electrostatic attraction between a charged polymer and a grounded surface when a voltage is applied between the two. This process was patented in 1934 by Formhals, but it was not until the 1990's that this process became widely studied by many scientists around the world. Nearly all of the techniques involving this process being utilized today concentrate on producing fibers from a polymeric solution; very little work has been done using polymeric melts. Electrospinning from solution has been very successful in producing fibers with diameters smaller then 100 nanometers but this process has its disadvantages. As many polymeric solutions contain approximately 10% polymer and 90% solution, the yield from this process is extremely low. Also, many of the chemicals that are being used are quite costly to dispose of and purchase. It is known that electrospinning from a melt would require no solvent and therefore the costs would be reduced along with increasing the yield by nearly an order of magnitude. However, a great majority of the fibers produced from melt-electrospinning and larger then 1 micron in diameter and are no smaller then what can be produced commercially. The focus of this paper is to develop new experimental methods to successfully minimize the fiber diameter when electrospinning from the melt and design and basic model that is capable of determining the final fiber diameter using the polymers properties and the experimental parameters.
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Details
- Title
- Developments in melt-electrospinning of thermoplastic polymers
- Creators
- J LyonsC PastoreF Ko
- Publication Details
- Polymer preprints, Vol.44(2)
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Architecture, Design, and Urbanism
- Identifiers
- 991019170438904721