Needleless electrospinning for large scale production of ultrathin polymer fibres

For large scale electrospun (e-spun) nanofibre production, a variety of electrospinning (e-spinning) techniques such as multi-needle e-spinning and needleless e-spinning have been developed recently. In this paper, we propose a new design of efficient needleless e-spinning for fabrication of polymer nanofibres. A circular rotary bead wire driven by a DC motor is used as needleless electrode. When e-spinning, numerous solution jets are generated from the bead wire electrode through wrapping the electrode with solution from the solution brush. The design, construction and testing of the novel needleless e-spinning from rotary bead wire electrode are described in detail. The average diameter of the resultant polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) fibres produced under 15–30 kV is around 200 nm. This needleless e-spinning technique may be promising for mass production of nanofibres.