Electrospun Fibers of Lecithin/Bile Salt from Wormlike Micellar Solutions
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Yang, Hsin-Ni
Abstract
The electrospinning technique is a versatile method for the fabrication of continuous ultrafine fibers. There are many advantages of electrospun fibers, such as high surface area to volume ratio, adjustable porosity, and varying functionality on fiber surface. Electrospun fibers are generally fabricated from polymer solutions with entangled polymer chains. In this work, instead of polymer, we used the electrospinning technique to fabricate fibers composed of lecithin and bile salts, which are naturally occurring small biosurfactants. Lecithin is the main component of the cell membrane and bile salts are facial amphiphiles that involve in digestion process. In general, small molecules are unable to entangle in solutions. However, it has been reported that lecithin/bile salt mixtures can form wormlike-micelles in specific conditions in low polar organic solvents. Similar to polymer chains, the wormlike micelles are flexible chains that can be sufficiently long to entangle one another and impart viscoelasticity to solutions, which provides the opportunity for small molecules to be electrospun into fibers. By the strategy of molecular self-assembly, we successfully obtained lecithin/bile salt fibers electrospun from the solutions of lecithin/bile salt wormlike micelles in THF or cyclohexane/THF cosolvents. We systematically studied the required solvent quality, concentration, viscosity, and conductivity of the solutions and optimized the electrospinning conditions. The lecithin/bile salt fibers are fully biocompatible and could be potential for biomedical applications.
Subjects
Electrospinning
wormlike micelles
lecithin
bile salts
self-assembly
fibers
Type
thesis
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