An IGBT-Based Pulsed Power Supply for Fabricating Noncontinuous Nanofibers Using Electrospinning

Nanofibers are useful in many areas due to their outstanding characteristics, most importantly their small size and high surface-area-to-volume ratio. Recently, drug delivery systems using polymer nanofibers have gained significant attention. For these systems, a chopped nanofiber is required because the amount of drug released depends on the length of the fiber. Electrospinning is a simple method of fabricating polymer nanofibers. In the process, a high voltage is used to electrify a liquid jet which ultimately produces a solid nanofiber. The jet ejects when a high voltage is applied and vice versa. It is therefore possible to fabricate and chop nanofibers by controlling the value of the voltages applied. In this paper, an IGBT-based pulsed power supply, which can produce square pulses with a width of a few hundred microseconds and amplitudes up to 10 kV, has been designed and built. It was able to fabricate and chop nanofibers with polyethylene oxide (PEO) and a biodegradable polymer, sodium alginate blended with PEO, utilizing the aforementioned pulsed power supply. A jet always ejected during the pulse-on voltage when the duty ratio is more than 40%, with a minimum pulsewidth of approximately 80 ms.