Beaudoin Étienne J, Kubaski Maurício M, Samara Mazen, Zednik Ricardo J, Demarquette Nicole R
Department of Mechanical Engineering, École de Technologie Supérieure, Montréal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada.
Nanomaterials (Basel). 2022 Apr 15;12(8):1356. doi: 10.3390/nano12081356.
Electrospinning has gained much attention in recent years due to its ability to easily produce high-quality polymeric nanofibers. However, electrospinning suffers from limited production capacity and a method to readily scale up this process is needed. One obvious approach includes the use of multiple electrospinning needles operating in parallel. Nonetheless, such an implementation has remained elusive, partly due to the uneven electric field distribution resulting from the Coulombic repulsion between the charged jets and needles. In this work, the uniformization of the electric field was performed for a linear array of twenty electrospinning needles using lateral charged plates as auxiliary electrodes. The effect of the auxiliary electrodes was characterized by investigating the semi-vertical angle of the spun jets, the deposition area and diameter of the fibers, as well as the thickness of the produced membranes. Finite element simulation was also used to analyze the impact of the auxiliary electrodes on the electric field intensity below each needle. Implementing parallel lateral plates as auxiliary electrodes was shown to help achieve uniformization of the electric field, the semi-vertical angle of the spun jet, and the deposition area of the fibers for the multi-needle electrospinning process. The high-quality morphology of the polymer nanofibers obtained by this improved process was confirmed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). These findings help resolve one of the primary challenges that have plagued the large-scale industrial adoption of this exciting polymer processing technique.
近年来，静电纺丝因其能够轻松生产高质量聚合物纳米纤维而备受关注。然而，静电纺丝存在生产能力有限的问题，因此需要一种能够轻松扩大该工艺规模的方法。一种显而易见的方法是使用多个并行操作的静电纺丝针。尽管如此，这种实施方案仍然难以实现，部分原因是带电射流与针之间的库仑排斥导致电场分布不均匀。在这项工作中，使用横向带电板作为辅助电极，对由二十个静电纺丝针组成的线性阵列进行了电场均匀化处理。通过研究纺丝射流的半垂直角度、纤维的沉积面积和直径以及所制备膜的厚度，对辅助电极的效果进行了表征。还使用有限元模拟来分析辅助电极对每个针下方电场强度的影响。结果表明，采用平行侧板作为辅助电极有助于实现多针静电纺丝过程中的电场均匀化、纺丝射流的半垂直角度以及纤维的沉积面积。通过扫描电子显微镜（SEM）证实了通过这种改进工艺获得的聚合物纳米纤维具有高质量的形态。这些发现有助于解决困扰这种令人兴奋的聚合物加工技术大规模工业应用的主要挑战之一。
