Porous tubular structures with controlled fibre orientation using a modified electrospinning method

Electrospinning offers an avenue to produce small diameter tubes made out of nanofibres. However, to date, most tubes from electrospun fibres have been either random fibres or from sheets that were rolled into tubes. Although there have been suggestions of getting tubes made of circumferentially aligned fibres, this is the first time that a method used to create a tube made of diagonally aligned electrospun fibres has been described. This tube was formed by depositing fibres on a rotating tube during electrospinning to give a resultant tube with uniform thickness and superior all round mechanical strength without any line of weakness. A knife-edged auxiliary electrode was given a charge that was opposite to that of the charge given to the needle to create an electrostatic field that encouraged fibre alignment on a rotating tube collector. A tubular structure made of nanofibres aligned in a diagonal direction was produced through electrospinning.

[1]  Eyal Zussman,et al.  Electrostatic field-assisted alignment of electrospun nanofibres , 2001 .

[2]  E. Zussman,et al.  Failure modes of electrospun nanofibers , 2003 .

[3]  James K. Hirvonen,et al.  Controlled deposition of electrospun poly(ethylene oxide) fibers , 2001 .

[4]  V. Subramanian,et al.  Electrospinning of continuous aligned polymer fibers , 2004 .

[5]  P. Powell,et al.  Engineering with Fibre-Polymer Laminates , 1993 .

[6]  Seeram Ramakrishna,et al.  Electrospun poly(L-lactide-co-glycolide) biodegradable polymer nanofibre tubes for peripheral nerve regeneration , 2004 .

[7]  Jayant Kumar,et al.  Electrospun Nanofibrous Membranes for Highly Sensitive Optical Sensors , 2002 .

[8]  E. Zussman,et al.  Formation of nanofiber crossbars in electrospinning , 2003 .

[9]  M. Brenner,et al.  Experimental characterization of electrospinning: the electrically forced jet and instabilities , 2001 .

[10]  Younan Xia,et al.  Electrospinning of polymeric and ceramic nanofibers as uniaxially aligned arrays , 2003 .

[11]  M. Kotaki,et al.  Aligned biodegradable nanofibrous structure: a potential scaffold for blood vessel engineering. , 2004, Biomaterials.

[12]  George G. Chase,et al.  Continuous Electrospinning of Aligned Polymer Nanofibers onto a Wire Drum Collector , 2004 .

[13]  J D Stitzel,et al.  Arterial Smooth Muscle Cell Proliferation on a Novel Biomimicking, Biodegradable Vascular Graft Scaffold , 2001, Journal of biomaterials applications.

[14]  Darrell H. Reneker,et al.  Bending instability of electrically charged liquid jets of polymer solutions in electrospinning , 2000 .

[15]  David G Simpson,et al.  Electrospinning of collagen nanofibers. , 2002, Biomacromolecules.

[16]  Younan Xia,et al.  Electrospinning Nanofibers as Uniaxially Aligned Arrays and Layer‐by‐Layer Stacked Films , 2004 .

[17]  M. Kotaki,et al.  A review on polymer nanofibers by electrospinning and their applications in nanocomposites , 2003 .