I often stumble on the fact that scientists use the term "nanofibers" when they describe a product from electrospinning process. I did that too, without thinking at the beginning of my work, but now I am trying to be more careful. Shouldn't we use the actual size of the fiber as a determination of their type (I propose below 300nm - nanofibers; 300-1000 submicron fibers; 1000nm and more - microfibers. It is still bending the definition of nanoscale, but less than what we can see in scientific papers.)?
This connection between electrospinning and nanofibers is not accurate and became a habit. Not all fibers produced by electrospinning are nanofibers! One can even spot a papers where fibers with mean diameter of about 2000nm and the lowest diameter about 500nm are called nanofibers (which is, by definition, wrong).
Shouldn't reviewers ask authors to be more precise in naming their objects of interest? Do we really need buzz words like "nano" so much that we need to bend definitions?
What is your point of view?
There’s more funding for ’nano’ projects...
By the way, we had 6.1E8 nm of snow here in Massachusetts last week.....
There’s more funding for ’nano’ projects...
By the way, we had 6.1E8 nm of snow here in Massachusetts last week.....
Yup, we do it because it sounds cool. Technically nanofibers should be less than 100nm in dia.
Good point. Could you please name the paper used 2000 nm ...
would be instructive
ASTM and ISO standards define ‘nano‘ as at least one dimension < 100 nm.
Dear Ali, I would rather not to name this paper. I can only point that it was published in one of the IOP journals (Materials Research Express). I do not want to point a finger at any specific group of scientists, rather at a specific problem all of you described: funding drives our interpretation of reality.
I was hoping that I will get the attention of the reviewers (for journals, grant proposals, graduate work, etc.) to change that.
Dear Alan, thank you for those standards. It gives good basis for this discussion. In Warsaw we have a little less snow now.
The record holder know to me is a 12'000 nm fiber. The authors have also spun submicrometer fibers and just kept the unit throughout the paper.
Some editors and reviewer will advice you to use an adequate unit. And yes there are Editors that are fed up with otherworldly statements (nano- bio- etc) and reject publications.
In case people don't get confused enough, our electron beam PVD machine deposits metals onto whatever substrate you want and measures the metal coating thickness in kiloAngstroms.
We have results in nanofurlongs and nanoSmoots... remembering that a finger nail grows around 1 nm in a second...
Actually, its also my question when I started to research about fibers. I think we need a scientific paper discussing about this situation. The encyclopedia about nanofibers can be found here: Nanofibers, Encyclopedia Nanosci. Nanotechnol., 6, 727-738 (2004)
A useful set of comments, to which I will alert reviewers of submissions to JTI.
We need to encourage clarity.
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