Hello Everyone,
Last week my goal was to electrospin PVDF, it was more of a challenge than originally thought. There are plenty of papers out there about people electrospinning PVDF, however, most of them use some nasty solvents that are not ideal for what we are doing. We started out by using DMSO (Dimethyl sulfoxide) and tested a few different concentrations of PVDF (15%,12.5%,10%,7.5%) and none of the concentrations were working. We then moved onto NMP (N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone) and went through the same arrangement of concentrations of the PVDF and still no luck. NMP is a better solvent for PVDF but it still wasn’t the perfect match for what we wanted. After some talk about what our next move would be, we decided that because we got consistent results when electrospinning PVP we are now attempting to crosslink mats that have been electrospun already to make them insoluble in water. When we find out the right wavelength of the UV light and the time needed for the mat to be exposed we will move onto forming LDH within the PVP mats.
PVP Mat Electrospun
UV lamp
Here are a few pictures of a PVP mat made by using the needless setup and the UV lamp that we are using to crosslink the PVP.
-Tanner Rosenthal