Influence of sheath solvents on the quality of ethyl cellulose nanofibers in a coaxial electrospinning process

The influence of different types of solvents as sheath fluids on the quality of electrospun ethyl cellulose (EC) nanofibers is investigated in this paper by a modified coaxial process. With 24 w/v % EC in ethanol as electrospinning core fluid and pure solvents including methanol, ethanol and N,N-dimethyl formamide (DMF) as sheath fluids, EC nanofibers were generated by the modified processes. Field emission scanning electron microscope observations demonstrate that the modified process is effective in improving the nanofibers' quality in terms of nanofibers' diameters, distributions and structural uniformity. The key of the modified coaxial process is the reasonable selection of the sheath solvents that is suitable for the drawing process of core EC fluid during the electrpospinning. The EC nanofibers' diameters (D, nm) could be manipulated through the reasonable selection of the type of the sheath solvents based on their boiling point (T, °C) D = 841–3.71T (R=0.9753). This paper provides useful methods for the implementation of the modified coaxial process controllably to obtain polymer nanofibers with high quality.