Abstract :
This article is a perspective that includes an introduction to nanofibers, nanofiber production methods, and the scale up of nanofiber production. It has been proven that nanofibers have huge application potentials in diverse areas. Therefore, many attempts have been made to scale up the nanofibers production in the recent decade. In most cases, mass production involved the use of arrays of nozzles. The production rates of these designs were limited by the spacing between jets or nozzles and the electric field interference that occurs when the jets are too close to each other. Several researchers have tried to mass-produce nanofibers by using a free surface of polymer solution, including electrospinning based on a two-layer system, bubble electrospinning, spider spinning, ball electrospinning, disc electrospinning, cleft electrospinning, porous tube electrospinning, porous electrospinning with drilled hole, ring electrospinning, stepped pyramid stage, wire electrode, and etc. Among them, the most successful one which has the ability to produce nanofibers on a large scale is spider spinning. In addition, more recently some works on mass production were based on utilizing other forces rather than electrostatic force. In this case, centrifuge spinning is a viable alternative for mass production of nanofibers. Also, some other works used a secondary force to assist electrostatic force such as magnetic force aided method, air-flow force aided method and centrifugal force aided method. The examples illustrated herein have shown that free surface electrospinning as well as hybrid electrospinning can be promising technologies for the mass production of continuous polymeric nanofibers.
