Fiber diameter control in electrospinning

© 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. A simple model is proposed to predict the fiber diameter in electrospinning. We show that the terminal diameter is determined by the kinetics of the jet elongation - under the influence of the electric and viscous forces - and the solvent evaporation. Numerical and simple scaling analyses are performed, predicting the fiber diameter to scale as a power 1/3 of viscosity and 2/3 of polymer solution throughput divided by electrical current. Model predictions show a good agreement to our own electrospinning experiments on polyamide-6 solutions as well as to the data available in the literature.