Evaluation of Fe3O4/PAN magnetic nanofibrous membrane for heat generation and magnetic actuation

Nanofibers are being widely applied in biomedicine, especially in tissue engineering given their porosity. We developed magnetic nanofibrous membranes aiming to devise new applications that use their thermal properties and mobility for actively targeted hyperthermia and microrobots. We fabricated Fe3O4 (iron oxide)/PAN (polyacrylonitrile) nanofibrous membranes and verified the properties of corresponding nanoparticles/fiber composites. Fe3O4 is a material with superparamagnetic properties under a critical size and can be controlled by a magnetic field and heated up by a high frequency alternating magnetic field. The Fe3O4/PAN nanofibers in this study were prepared at concentration of 20, 25, and 30 wt% by dispersing Fe3O4 nanoparticles of 20 nm in a PAN solution. At a nanoparticle concentration of 30wt%, the magnetic membrane generated heat up to 49.9°C in a magnetic field of 15.57kA/m and a driving frequency of 205.9 kHz during 600 s. In addition, we investigated the performance for steering and active locomotion (robotic control) of a magnetic nanofibrous membrane with 3 mm in diameter by using magnetic force control. The ranges (0.08~.014 mT/mm) of fiend gradient provided an average movement speed of 2.15 mm/s with accurate steering. The robotic control ability of the proposed magnetic nanofibrous membrane seems promising for increasing the diversity of biomedical applications for magnetic nanofibers as microrobot.