Issue 38, 2017

Shaping helical electrospun filaments: a review

Abstract

Nature abounds with helical filaments designed for specific tasks. For instance, some plants use tendrils to coil and attach to the surroundings, while Spiroplasma, a helical bacterium, moves by inverting the helical handedness along the filament axis. Therefore, developing methods to shape filaments on demand to exhibit a diversity of physical properties and shapes could be of interest to many fields, such as the textile industry, biomedicine or nanotechnology. Electrospinning is a simple and versatile technique that allows the production of micro and nanofibres with many different helical shapes. In this work, we review the different electrospinning procedures that can be used to obtain helical shapes similar to those found in natural materials. These techniques also demonstrate that the creation of helical shapes at the micro/nanoscale is not limited by the chirality of the building blocks at the molecular level, a finding which opens new horizons on filament shaping.

Graphical abstract: Shaping helical electrospun filaments: a review

Article information

Article type
Review Article
Submitted
29 juin 2017
Accepted
23 août 2017
First published
23 août 2017

Soft Matter, 2017,13, 6678-6688

Shaping helical electrospun filaments: a review

P. E. S. Silva, F. Vistulo de Abreu and M. H. Godinho, Soft Matter, 2017, 13, 6678 DOI: 10.1039/C7SM01280B

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