Electrospinning system design and nanofiber production

In electrospinning process nano structured solid fibers are produced from charged polymer jet oriented at external electrostatic field. Materials such as polymer, composites and tissue scaffold fibers have been fabricated with electrospinning techniques. The typical obstacle of electrospun fiber production is the whipping instability resulted from the chaotic oscillation of polymer jet.In this study, feasibility of suppressing the whipping instability is analyzed and explained with a mathematical model based for the secondary electrostatic field created by finite length hollow cylinder. Additionally, parallel plate conducting electrodes are applied through the jet trajectory in order to investigate the possibility of controlled deposition of polymer fibers. Parallel electrodes are driven to generate a time-varying steering field for manipulating the fiber mat formation at the collector plate.It is shown that the three-dimensional path of polymer jet calculated by computer simulations based on the application of finite length hollow cylinder focus the characteristic spot size of the deposited electrospun fiber to a smaller diameter which is coherent to the experimental observations. Moreover electrospun polymer fibers accumulated in a controlled fashion at the collector with the modulated electric field.