Large-scale patterned nanofibers via tip-less electrospinning

Tip-less Electrospinning (TLES) process has been developed to produce polymer nanofibers with high throughput. And the ameliorated collector with parallel top-down configurations of two different materials in conventional electrospinning, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET)-glass, copper-glass and PET-silicon etc, can achieve patterned nanofibers to expand its future applications. In this paper such patterned collectors array with changed electric field around, are introduced to TLES to deposit large-scale patterned nanofibers. The experiment results show that patterned nanofibers can be collected along the gap between plastic plates in both plastic-glass and plastic-silicon configuration. To the copper-glass collector, nanofibers bridge over the gap and the nanofiber quantity density on the gap is much less than that on the copper. But the patterned effects in all configurations are relatively weaker than that from foremetioned spinning due to their much higher speed, more serious bending instability and repulsive interactions between as-spun nanofibers.