A study on biomedical applications of centrifugal spun ultrafine fibrous mat

Abstract

Ultrafine fibres are thin fibres with diameters ranging from microns down to few nanometers The requirements of ultrafine fibres in the biomedical field are increasing day by day Owing to their salient characteristic features including high surface area to volume ratio high porosity with well interconnected pores they mimic the architecture of native Extra Cellular Matrix ECM At present template synthesis phase separation self assembly wet spinning melt spinning and electrospinning are used to produce ultrafine fibers Among these electrospinning is the most popular and is a well established technique But the utilization of electrospinning is limited by its low production rate higher risk levels and the difficulty in getting an aligned fibre morphology in the matrices produced by this method Recently various attempts have been made to develop submicron fibres at high production rates by modifications of electrospinning including bubble electrospinning and multineedle electrospinning as well as air jet spinning and force spinning Moreover trials have been attempted to attain aligned fibrous substrates from electrospinning by using devices like wire drum collectors high speed rotating drums patterned electrodes and two pole air gap electrodes But none of these techniques have yielded satisfactory results Centrifugal spinning is an alternative method for producing ultrafine fibers from various materials at low cost and a high production rate Aligned fibres can be effortlessly produced by the centrifugal spinning process The use of centrifugal spun ultrafibre fibrous matrices in the biomedical field is still in its infancy So the present study aims to examine the efficiency of centrifugal spun aligned ultrafine fibrous mats in various biomedical applications such as drug release wound dressing and tissue engineering applications Throughout the study in house built high voltage free centrifugal spinning system was used to produce aligned ultrafine fibrous matrices newline