Making ‘nanospinning’ practical
Nanofibers — strands of material only a couple hundred nanometers in diameter — have a huge range of possible applications: scaffolds for bioengineered organs, ultrafine air and water filters, and lightweight Kevlar body armor, to name just a few. But so far, the expense of producing them has consigned them to a few high-end, niche applications.Luis Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and his group hope to change that. At the International Workshop on Micro and Nanotechnology for Power Generation and Energy Conversion Applications in December, Velásquez-García, his student Philip Ponce de Leon, and Frances Hill, a postdoc in his group, will describe a new system for spinning nanofibers that should offer significant productivity increases while drastically reducing power consumption. Using manufacturing techniques common in the microchip industry, the MTL researchers built a one-square-centimeter array of conical tips, which they immersed in a fluid containing a...