Continuous bundles of aligned electrospun PAN nano-fiber using electrostatic spiral collector and converging coil

We develop an advanced electrospinning process that uses an electrostatic spiral collecting coil and a converging coil to produce a polyacrylonitrile (PAN) polymer fiber with a nanometer-sized diameter. The electrostatic spiral collecting coil was used as a collector on which to deposit a continuous and aligned PAN polymer fiber, and the converging coil was used to adjust the collecting area of the fibers. The fiber bundles were continuously withdrawn from the spiral collector, and to estimate the behavior of the fibers, equipotential lines were calculated for the electrospinning system by using a 3D simulation program. A high-speed camera and a magnifying camera were used to observe the actual behavior of the fibers. In this study, the interval distance of the spiral collecting coil was adjusted to obtain bundles of with various diameters for use in various applications. The average diameter of the fibers is of about 250 nm, and the range of the average diameter of the bundles is between 30 μm and 120 μm. Among the fiber bundles, around 90 μm of the bundle was best well-aligned and its fracture force and strain strength were of around 80 mN and 12.6 MPa before the stabilization process.