I know that electrospinning of chitosan is difficult due to high viscosity and surface tension of typical acetic acid solution. According to one paper, I reacted chitosan with methansulfonic acid, freeze dried and dissolved it in DMSO. Now the viscosity is OK and surface tension of DMSO is 42 mN/m that is half of the value for water. But still I can not do the electrospinning and small droplets exit the needle instead fibers (sth like electrospray but the diameter of droplets is around 0.2 mm). Anybody has an idea?
If small droplets are forming up the needle tip, did you try to reduce the tip-collector distance or increase the voltage?? Hope you did that to optimise.
Alernatively you could try dissolving chitosan in formic acid and electrospin it.
The article below might be helpful
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0734975009001852
Dear Arun
I also changed the distance and voltage but it did not work.
hello, the article bellow may be helpful for you
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144861709000988
good luck
Did you try reducing the viscosity(either by reducing the concentration or by adding any substances) of the solution??
Dear Arun
As I said, after reacting with methansulfonic acid and freeze drying the solubility and viscosity are OK. But I am not sure about surface tension. The surface tension of pure DMSO is 42. But the surface tension of DMSO-Chitosan is still a question for me. Can chitosan increase the surface tension of solution to more than 42?
You can also use another polymer to help doing the electrospinning. Usually people use the polymer PEO and it works really well! You can find articles on that in litterature :)! Good luck!
Dear Gilles,
I know about PEO. But I want to use it for water filtration. Therefore PEO will go dissolve into water and filter will break down.
From what I remember, considering elecrospinning, equations exist which involves many parameters such as capillary number, reynolds number, ohnsorge number. Did you check that to make sure that all those dimensionless number are in the range of what is normally expected for such a process? Especially to make sure that you obtain a Taylor cone shape to electrospin correctly. People in my team tried to electrospun Chitosan but they used PEO. You may also try a mixing of different acid (lactic, acetic...) together.
Hi,
in the case of chitosan electrospinning, there is a serious problem related to high concentration of electric charges (+) due to the inherent nature of chitosan molecules. One of the possible way is just blending with other polymer. The other - non-trivial way, we use in our attempts, is electrospinning with the negative potential on the needle
Dear Pawel
Thank you for your comment. Did it work well for you with negative potential on the needle?
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Molecular Biology
- Molecular Biological Techniques