Electrospinning Technique: From Basic Research to the Design of Functionalized Surfaces and Commercialization Devices

The use of surface engineering techniques to tune-up the composition of nanostructured thin films is a hot topic in the scientific community for the design of functionalized surfaces with advanced properties. One of the most prominent techniques is the electrospinning which is used to produce continuous nanofibers from numerous materials, including polymers, metals, and ceramics by using an electrostatic force. A good control over the resultant fiber morphology is obtained as a function of the operational parameters (flow rate, applied voltage, or distance tip to collector) as well as the intrinsic properties of the precursor (concentration, viscosity, nature of solvent). Its simplicity, cost-effective and easily exploitable enables to be of great interest for technological areas or biomedical applications such as in the design of superhydrophobic surfaces in membrane filtration, efficient antibacterial textiles, anticorrosive surfaces or even in optical fiber devices for monitoring the human breathing, among others. According to Scopus database found that around 1600 research articles with the words “Electrospinning” and “Surfaces” have been published in 2019 with an important increase in the number of publications between 2005 and 2019. Finally, nowadays electrospinning technique can be considered as a vibrant research field in materials science and engineering, being a promising lab and industrial-scale technique due to its scalability and high versatility.