“Practical” Electrospinning of Biopolymers in Ionic Liquids

To address the need to scale up technologies for electrospinning of biopolymers from ionic liquids to practical volumes, a setup for the multi-needle electrospinning of chitin using the ionic liquid 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate, [C2 mim]-[OAc], was designed, built, and demonstrated. Materials with controllable and high surface area were prepared at the nanoscale using ionic-liquid solutions of high-molecular-weight chitin extracted with the same ionic liquid directly from shrimp shells.