TY - JOUR
T1 - Shaping helical electrospun filaments: A review
AU - Silva, P. E. S.
AU - Vistulo de Abreu, F.
AU - Godinho, M. H.
N1 - All authors acknowledge financial support from Foundation for Science and Technology UID/CTM/50025/2013 (LA0025) and M-ERA-NET2/0007/2016 - CellColor. P. E. S. Silva acknowledges grant FCT SFRH/BD/76369/2011.
PY - 2017/1/1
Y1 - 2017/1/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85030771726&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1039/c7sm01280b
DO - 10.1039/c7sm01280b
M3 - Review article
C2 - 28858364
AN - SCOPUS:85030771726
VL - 13
SP - 6678
EP - 6688
JO - Soft Matter
JF - Soft Matter
SN - 1744-683X
IS - 38
ER -