Fiber diameter control in electrospinning

Abstract

A simple model is proposed to predict the fiber diameter in electrospinning. We show that the terminal diameter is determined by the kinetics of the jet elongation—under the influence of the electric and viscous forces—and the solvent evaporation. Numerical and simple scaling analyses are performed, predicting the fiber diameter to scale as a power 1/3 of viscosity and 2/3 of polymer solution throughput divided by electrical current. Model predictions show a good agreement to our own electrospinning experiments on polyamide-6 solutions as well as to the data available in the literature.