Electrospinning process to make nanofibers by UC Berkeley
19 Apr '06
3 min read
Electrospinning process
A nanometer is one-thousandth of a micron, or about the width of 10 atoms.) Until now, the closest process for straightening electrospun fibers has been one that twists them around a spool-like contraption as soon as they are produced.
When Daoheng Sun, a professor of mechanical and electrical engineering from China's Xiamen University came to Liwei Lin's laboratory at UC Berkeley for two years with the Berkeley Scholars Program in 2004, he looked around for a suitable research project.
He and Lin, a professor of mechanical engineering, came up with the idea of trying to tame the electrospinning process to make orderly arrays of fibers.
"I'd been doing work with nanotechnology, but nothing on electrospinning before then," Lin said. "We were really outsiders in the field, so we didn't have any preconceived notions. We just tried things that others may have never thought about. And in the end, they worked just fine."
What they attained with their innovations are fibers ranging from 50 to 500 nanometers in diameter that are deposited onto a collector plate in a directed, controlled manner.
In reference to the shortened distance between the ejector and collection points that it used, the team named the new process "near-field electrospinning."
"Conventional electrospinning is a random, chaotic process," Lin said. "Our breakthrough is that we are now able to control fairly precisely the location and deposition of the nanofibers."
Sun and Lin's method varies in four important ways from the conventional method of electrospinning.
Click here to see more details:
Berkeley's first chancellor, Clark Kerr (1911-2003) guided the campus during an era of intense planning and growth that helped build Berkeley's reputation as a major research university and laid the groundwork for core student services.
marketing@alchempro.com
