Electro-Mechanical Spinning: A new manufacturing technique for micro/nano-fabrication of carbon fibers

Electrospinning is an inexpensive technology used for the large-scale production of continuous nanofiber materials. The development of Electro-Mechanical Spinning (EMS) technology by our team is based on electrospinning, but achieves greater deposition control at the single nanofiber level while maintaining the low cost of the original process. By integrating EMS with Carbon-MEMS and Focused Ion Beam (FIB) technologies, we anticipate the manufacturing of a whole set of functional devices. In this paper, we have widened the scope of EMS technology by developing a novel ink formulation for C-MEMS. This newly developed polymeric ink has been successfully optimized to fabricate highly-controlled and patterned carbon precursor polymer nanofibers. After pyrolysis, these fibers are converted into carbon nanofibers, which can be easily integrated into a Carbon-MEMS structure or device. There are many fields and applications that can take advantage of EMS patterned carbon nanofibers, especially in the field of electrochemical sensors. To illustrate this potential, we have fabricated aligned carbon fibers, suspended on Carbon-MEMS electrode structures. Fibers are then alternately cut with FIB to form an array of suspended Interdigitated Electrodes (IDE), effectively creating an advanced type of electrochemical nanosensor. We expect that our device will offer higher sensitivity and lower manufacturing costs over traditional flat IDEs, due to the intrinsic 3D characteristics of the structures.