Electrospinning of Aligned Fibrous Materials on an Inner Rapidly Rotating Cone Surface

The paper presents a new way for producing fibrous mats with aligned micro- and nano-fibres by electrospinning technique using a fast rotating filter basket of a properly adapted commercial centrifugal juicer as the collecting electrode. This method was used to ob-tain the fibrous materials from polylactide (PLA) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) with dif-ferent degrees of fibres aligned depending on the linear velocity of the rotating substrate. The highest degree of the fibre alignment, measured by the planar orientation factor, with a value of 0.8- 0.9, was obtained at the linear speeds of the rotating substrate in the range of 22- 36 m/s. Using the gravimetric method, the velocity of fibre formation during elec-trospinning was tested under different conditions, i.e. at the immobile substrate as well as rapidly rotating, reaching values ranging from 4 to 200 m/s. The investigations suggest that electrospinning of the fibres on the rapidly rotating substrate is not only a modification of their receiving, but also significantly changes the nature of the fibre formation in this spin-ning technique. Key words: electrospinning, fibrous mat, polylactide, polyvinyl alcohol, rotating cone