Study on the orientation and density of electrospun fibers using collectors with various shapes and holes

Abstract

Electrospinning is a simple and useful method for fabricating nano and microfibers. Electrosun fibers are fabricated into various shapes to be applied in various fields such as filtration, electronics, and tissue engineering. The most popular form of fabrication in applications is alignment. One of the methods for aligning electrospun fibers is gap electrospinning, which proceeds by creating gaps in collectors. However, conventional gap electrospinning usually uses separated collectors and has difficulties in application to fabricate patterned collectors. In addition, there were limitations in manufacturing fiber substrates with complex patterns and sampling for application. Therefore, we tried to solve the above problems by using a gap in the form of a hole. In this paper, first, the shape of the collector was changed and the hole gap was kept constant to observe the change in the fiber. In the second, the shape of the hole gap was changed while maintaining the shape of the collector to observe the change of the fiber. Through this, the orientation and density of the fiber were analyzed to identify the tendency. And in order to prove these experimental results, a simulation was conducted using the COMSOL program.