Electrospinning process to make nanofibers by UC Berkeley
19 Apr '06
3 min read
Electrospinning technique at UC Berkeley
Californian University UC Berkeley said for 72 years, scientists have been able to use electric fields to spin polymers into tiny fibers.
But there's been just one problem: Like worms that won't stop wriggling, the fibers tangle randomly almost as soon as they are created.
Now, researchers at University of California, Berkeley, have found a way to use the electric-field process to make nanofibers in a direct, continuous and controllable manner.
The new technique, known as near-field electrospinning, offers the possibility of producing out of nanofibers new, specialized materials with organized patterns that can be used for such applications as wound dressings, filtrations and bio-scaffolds.
Electrospinning was first patented in 1934, when scientists learned how to eject a thin stream of polymer mixed with a solvent out of a syringe into a charged field. As the solvent evaporates, electric forces pull at the polymer, accelerating and elongating it into a long, wildly whipping fiber that forms a matted pile on a charged screen 10 to 30 centimeters away.
These orderly rows of nanofibers were created using the new near-field electrospinning process. Until now, electrospinning produced random tangles of fibers.
In the mid-1990s, the emerging field of nanotechnology rekindled interest in electrospinning. Since then, scientists have spun more than 100 synthetic and natural polymers into fibers with diameters ranging from tens of nanometers to a few microns. (A micrometer - also called a micron - is one-thousandth of a millimeter.
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