Ostheller Maike-Elisa, Balakrishnan Naveen Kumar, Groten Robert, Seide Gunnar
Aachen-Maastricht Institute for Biobased Materials (AMIBM), Maastricht University, Brightlands Chemelot Campus, Urmonderbaan 22, 6167 RD Geleen, The Netherlands.
Aachen-Maastricht Institute for Biobased Materials e.V. (AMIBM e.V.), Lutherweg 2, 52068 Aachen, Germany.
Polymers (Basel). 2022 Jul 14;14(14):2865. doi: 10.3390/polym14142865.
Melt electrospinning is a simple, versatile, and widely used technique for the production of microfibers and sub-microfibers. Polybutylene succinate (PBS) is a promising raw material for the preparation of melt-electrospun fibers at the laboratory scale. The inclusion of additives in the PBS melt can reduce the final fiber diameter, but economically feasible larger-scale processes remain challenging. The fiber diameter can also be reduced by machine optimization, although this is expensive due to the complexity of melt-electrospinning devices. Changes in electrical field polarity have provided a low-cost strategy to reduce the diameter of fibers produced by solution-electrospinning, but there is little information about the effect of this parameter on the final diameter of melt-electrospun fibers. We therefore determined the effect of field polarity on the diameter of melt-electrospun PBS fibers at the laboratory scale and investigated the transferability of these results to our 600-nozzle pilot-scale device. Changing the polarity achieved a significant reduction in fiber diameter of ~50% at the laboratory scale and ~30% at the pilot scale, resulting in a minimum average fiber diameter of 10.88 µm. Although the effect of field polarity on fiber diameter was similar at both scales, the fibers in the web stuck together at the laboratory scale but not at the pilot scale. We have developed an inexpensive method to reduce the diameter of melt-electrospun PBS fibers and our data provide insight into the transferability of melt electrospinning from the laboratory to a pilot-scale machine.
熔体静电纺丝是一种用于生产微纤维和亚微纤维的简单、通用且广泛应用的技术。聚丁二酸丁二醇酯（PBS）是实验室规模制备熔体静电纺丝纤维的一种有前景的原材料。在PBS熔体中加入添加剂可以减小最终纤维直径，但经济上可行的大规模生产工艺仍然具有挑战性。通过优化设备也可以减小纤维直径，不过由于熔体静电纺丝设备的复杂性，这样做成本很高。电场极性的改变为减小溶液静电纺丝所生产纤维的直径提供了一种低成本策略，但关于该参数对熔体静电纺丝最终纤维直径的影响，相关信息很少。因此，我们在实验室规模下确定了电场极性对熔体静电纺丝PBS纤维直径的影响，并研究了这些结果向我们的600喷嘴中试规模设备的可转移性。改变极性在实验室规模下使纤维直径显著减小约50%，在中试规模下减小约30%，从而得到最小平均纤维直径为10.88 µm。尽管电场极性对纤维直径的影响在两个规模下相似，但在实验室规模下纤维网中的纤维会粘在一起，而在中试规模下则不会。我们开发了一种降低熔体静电纺丝PBS纤维直径的低成本方法，我们的数据为熔体静电纺丝从实验室规模向中试规模设备的可转移性提供了见解。
