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Published online: 8 October 2008 | doi:10.1038/nchina.2008.238

Electrospinning: Taking it to the third dimension

Vicki Cleave

Introduction

© (2008) ACS

Electrospinning is a versatile technique for creating continuous fibres with diameters on the nanoscale. Usually, two-dimensional sheets of randomly arranged fibres are created by the process, but Daming Zhang and Jiang Chang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai¹ have developed an approach that could produce three-dimensional fibrous structures. A wide range of structures can be made through this approach, providing opportunities for applications in tissue engineering, blood-vessel reconstruction and filtration.

In a typical electrospinning system, a charged polymer solution is extruded as a jet from the tip of a syringe by electrostatic repulsion. The jet, which still carries a charge, is drawn towards a grounded collector template (usually a metal plate) placed some distance away. As the solvent in the polymer solution evaporates, a charged polymer fibre is left to accumulate on the grounded collector.

Zhang and Chang replaced the collector plate with a three-dimensional 'working collector' (usually a metal cylinder) that was coupled with two assistant collectors (a plane assistant collector and a stick assistant collector). Using these three collectors, the researchers could manipulate the electric fields to cause the electrospun fibres to deposit on the three-dimensional collector template, forming tubes with different shapes, open or closed ends, and even interconnected tubes (pictured). They could also create different nanofibre patterns on the structures, which have been shown to have an effect on cell activities in tissue engineering.

The authors of this work are from:
Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering Research Center, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.

Reference

1. Zhang, D. & Chang, J. Electrospinning of three–dimensional nanofibrous tubes with controllable architectures. Nano Lett. doi: 10.1021/nl801667s (2008).  | Article |