Electrospun poly lactic acid (PLA) fibres: Effect of different solvent systems on fibre morphology and diameter
By R. Casasola, N. Thomas, A. Trybala, S. Georgiadou. 2014
346 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The selection of an appropriate non-hazardous solvent or solvent system is essential to determine the rheological properties and electrospinnability of the solution, the productivity, and the morphology of nanofibres. In this study, poly lactic acid (PLA) solutions were prepared in various pure solvents and binary-solvent systems to investigate the effect of different solution properties on nanofibre morphology and diameter. Viscosity, conductivity and surface tension of each solution were measured. Nanofibre morphology was observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Of all the solvent systems used acetone/dimethylformamide gave the highest fibre productivity and finest defect-free nanofibres. Therefore this solvent system was studied in more detail, varying the solvent ratio. Also the polymer concentration in this solvent system was varied to investigate the effect on nanofibre morphology and solution properties. Morphological investigations were done in correlation with rheological measurements: beaded nanofibrous structures were collected from solutions with concentration around the critical chain entanglement concentration (Ce), while defect-free nanofibres were produced when the concentration was increased to about twice the entanglement concentration. Further investigation of the effect of the PLA concentration on the elastic (G′) and the plastic (G″) moduli showed a sudden increase of the elastic moduli (G′) at the critical chain entanglement concentration. The results showed that the solvent properties, boiling point, viscosity, conductivity and surface tension, have a significant effect on process productivity, morphology and diameter distribution of the PLA nanofibres.
Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a540fa6a2313ce76bc01628dffa1d62462fed89
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In Biomaterials
In Biomedical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Electrospinning of nanofibers and their applications for energy devices (2015, background): “5 times Ce smooth fibers are obtained [37, 38].”
- Porous electrospun polycaprolactone (PCL) fibres by phase separation (2015, background): “As a result of their small diameters, those fibres exhibit high surface area per volume ratio, which makes them excellent candidates for a wide range of applications [18], such as production of scaffolds for tissue engineering [21,3].”
- Fabricating porous poly(lactic acid) fibres via electrospinning (2018, methodology): “For the PLA solutions, a concentration of 15% w/v was chosen because at this concentration Casasola and co-workers [35] found that smooth and bead-free fibres could be electrospun.”