Controlling the fiber diameter during electrospinning

Physical Review Letters

Volumn 90, Issue 14, 2003, Pages

  Fridrikh, Sergey V ^a   Yu, Jian H ^a   Brenner, Michael P ^b   Rutledge, Gregory C ^a  

^a Massachusetts Institute of Technology   (United States)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ELECTRIC CURRENTS; ELECTRIC FIELDS; ELECTRODES; ELECTROSTATICS; EQUATIONS OF MOTION; JETS; LINEAR SYSTEMS; MATHEMATICAL MODELS; POLYMERS; SOLVENTS; SURFACE TENSION; VISCOUS FLOW;

ELECTROSPINNING; FLUID JETS; LINEAR INSTABILITY ANALYSIS; VISCOUS CHARGED FLUID; WHIPPING INSTABILITY;

SPINNING (FIBERS);

EID: 0038203336     PISSN: 00319007     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (18)

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17. The electrospinning apparatus consists of two aluminum disks 10 cm in diameter at a separation up to 30 cm (Fig. 1). Fluid is delivered to the capillary via a Teflon® feedline from a syringe pump (Harvard Apparatus PHD 2000). A power supply (Gamma High Voltage Research ES-30P) provides up to 30 kV to the upper disk. Current is measured by a digital multimeter (Fluke 85 III) as the voltage drop across a 1.0 MΩ resistor between the lower disk and ground. All chemicals were purchased from Aldrich. PCL (Mw 80 000) was dissolved in a mixture of chlorofom and methanol (3 to 1 by volume). The surface tensions (γ) varied between 25.0 and 28.1 dyn/cm, for the 8% and 12% solutions, respectively. The conductivity (K) of PCL solutions was 0.5 to 0.6 μS/cm. A 2 wt% solution of polyethylene oxide (PEO) (Mw 2 000 000) in water had γ = 61.8 dyn/cm and K = 81.3 μS/cm. Solutions of 10 and 8 wt % polyacrylonitrile (PAN) (Mw 150 000) in N, N-dimethyl formamide had γ = 37 dyn/cm and conductivities of 42.5 and 38.5 μS/cm, respectively. Surface tension was measured on a tensiometer (Kruss-10), conductivity was measured by a conductivity meter (Cole-Parmer-19820). Scanning electron microscopy (JOEL SEM 6320) was used to measure the fiber diameters after coating with a layer (150 Å thick) of Au/Pd.
18. We use χ = 100 in all calculations. Values ranging from χ = 10 (cf. Fig. 18 of Ref. [12]) to χ = 1000 (based on h = 100 μm for the fluid jet at the onset of instability and R = 10 cm) are probably reasonable. The exact value is not critical, since 1nχ varies slowly.