Design and Fabrication of a Complete Electrospinning System

During the electrospinning process, the most crucial and impactful factors affecting the quality of the PCL membrane on collectors include humidity, temperature, syringe pump speed. Additionally, some buffers may generate toxic gas that must be immediately evacuated from the environment, and the high voltage part of the device is dangerous that must be safely isolated from the users. Therefore, designing a complete electrospinning system that generates high-quality membranes and safety to use becomes vital. We designed a complete electrospinning system that includes: a protecting glass chamber equipped, an electronic controller to supervise and display environmental parameters. The chamber was built from profiled aluminum and glass, and a fume hood ventilator was used to suck gas out of the chamber. A controller system consisting of hardware design and firmware programming was implemented to measure temperature and humidity in electrospinning chamber; to control factors affecting the nanofiber membrane such as drum collector speed, syringe pump, temperature, and humidity. The zero-crossing technique was used to control temperature and speed of fume hood fan. Furthermore, the PID controller was applied to regulate the rotational movement of drum collector. We successfully built the complete electrospinning system. The temperature and humidity ranges varied from −40 to +125 °C and 0–100% RH, respectively. Rotational speed of the aluminum drum was from 0 to 2000 rpm. And the volume error of the electrical syringe pump on the average is 0.60% and the speed is from 0.1 to 20 ml/h.