A Novel Rotating Ring Collector for Electro-spinning of Nanofibers in Uniform Distribution

Electro-spinning of nanofibers can be applied to fabricate artificial scaffolds for tissue engineering. The uniformity of nanofibers distribution in each scaffold mat role plays critically in tissue engineering. Many attempts have been made to improve uniformity of nanofibers scaffolds but none of them could produce uniform distribution of nanofibers in scaffolds, completely. The aim of present research is to produce scaffolds with uniformly distributed nanofibers by using a rotating collector in electro-spinning setup. A novel collector was developed to produce nanofibers in uniform distribution by controlling the collector parameters. The distribution of the nanofibers was precisely controlled by adjusting the velocity of collector rotation and the diameter of collector. Experiments were carried out to investigate capability of presented method in adjusting the formation of distribution for Polycaprolactan (PCL) nanofibers. Significant improvement of the uniformity of the fiber distribution was observed by the image processing method of nanofibers SEM images.