Initial Study of Electrospinning PCL/PLLA Blends

Abstract

The process of electrospinning is considered one of the most promising methods for the fabrication of poly- mer nanofibers. This essentially consists of applying a high electric field, which causes stretching of the polymer which exits through a capillary. Among the numerous applications of this process, electrospinning allows the fabrication of semiconductor and conductive nanofibers from mixtures or solutions, which have great potential for applications in sensors and the fabrication of scaffolds for cell growth. The aim of this work was to analyze the properties of the blend, produces by the electrospinning of the PCL and PLLA solu- tion, with the focus to generate a promissory scaffold. PCL is a semi-crystalline aliphatic polymer that has a slower degradation rate 12 - 24 months. It has a low glass transition temperature at –60?C, a melting tem-perature at about 60?C, and a high thermal stability. Properties of PLA depend on the component isomers, processing temperature, annealing time and molecular weight. Thus were used PCL, from Aldrich, with Mw of 80,000 g/mol, and PLLA, sintered in laboratory, with Mw of 240,000 g/mol, were dissolved in chloroform (CHCl3, Merck) and acetone (Synth) by stirring for 6 hours. The solution was electrospinning for 1 hour us- ing the equipment made in the laboratory, the voltage used was 13 kv, the rate of 0.5 ml/h and an approxi- mate distance from the tip of the needle to the collector of 12 cm. The morphology of the samples was ob- served by images made with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and also was analyzed by FT-IR and DSC.