Piezoelectric(PZT) Ceramic-based Portable Electrospinning Apparatus

Long and colleagues have also designed a minimized portable electrospinning device based on a simple piezoelectric (PZT) ceramic generator (Duan et al., 2016), as can be seen in Fig. 2.22. The high voltage for electrospinning is supplied by one PZT generator, which can generate a very high pulsed voltage of about 56 kV. Fig. 2.22B is the structural drawing of the portable apparatus based on a PZT generator. When a force is applied on the button, the PZT element will be reshaped under the influence of stress. According to the PZT effect (Fig. 2.22A), the different charges are accumulated on two ends separately. The positive charges can be conducted to the spinneret by a metal lead and the negative charges can be connected to hand. Then a high voltage is generated between the two electrodes. And this may meet the requirement for electrospinning. Fig. 2.22C shows a digital picture of this portable electrospinning apparatus. By this simple setup, PVP, PVDF, and PS solutions can be electrospun into fibers (Duan et al., 2016). However, because of the generated pulsed voltage of this setup, the electrospinning process cannot be continuous; this simple electrospinning setup can be used only for teaching demonstrations.