Research And Application Of Portable Melt Electrospinning Devices

Recently,electrospinning have attracted much attention and researches as a simple and efficient way to fabricate nano materials.Electrospinning can be divided into solution electrospinning and melt electrospinning according to the form of electrospun material.The disadvantages of solution electrospinning include low efficiency,evaporation and toxicity of organic solvent.On the contrary,melt electrospinning can solve these problems because of its no use of solvent.However,the apparatus of melt electrospinning is much complex than solution electrospinning.In order to achieve the portability and simplification of electrospinning,some design proposals were proposed in this article.Firstly,a new melt electrospinning apparatus,which use a hand operated Wimshurst generator as high voltage power supply,was proposed.The new melt electrospinning setup based on a small hand-operated Wimshurst generator,which can avoid electrical interference between the high voltage spinning system and the heating system,and make the setup very portable and safe.Experimental parameters such as the rotational speed of the generator handle and the spinning distance were investigated.In addition,fibers were directly melt-electrospun onto a fresh pork liver,which indicate that the apparatus may be used in dressing for wound healing.Secondly,we have put forward another melt electrospinning setup based on a alcohol lamp as heating system.The traditional heating systems of melt e-spinning setup usually include electrical heating system,heated air system,circulating fluids system and laser heating system,which make the setup complicated and rely on extra electricity supply.This simple and portable melt electrospinner can demonstrate the melt e-spinning process indoors or outdoors not depending on extra power supply.In addition,we study the influence of different experimental parameters such as the temperature of charging barrel,e-spinning distance and the inner diameter of spinneret on fibers.Different polymers were electrospun into fibers successfully by this apparatus,which demonstrate the feasibility and stability of the simple device.Finally,we report on a new simple electrospinning setup using a piezoelectric ceramic(PZT)generator to replace the traditional high voltage power supply.The pulsed voltage generated by a PZT element is about 56 kV because of the piezoelectric effect,which can meet the requirement for e-spinning.The volume of this device can be reduced to 5×1×1cm3 and the weight is only 10 g,which may be the simplest e-spinning device until now.