New Horizons in Modeling and Simulation of Electrospun Nanofibers: a Detailed Review

Electrospinning is applied to create continuous fibers with nanometer diameters through jetting polymer solutions in high electric fields. A drawback of this method, however, is the unstable behavior of the liquid jet, which causes the fibers to be collected randomly. So a critical concern in this process is to achieve desirable control. Studying the dynamics of the electrospinning jet will be easier and faster, if it can be modeled and simulated, rather than doing experiments. This paper focuses on modeling and then simulating the electrospinning process as viewed by different approaches. In order to study the applicability of the electrospinning modeling equations, which have been discussed in detail in earlier parts of this review, an existing mathematical model, in which the jet is considered as a mechanical system, has been interconnected with viscoelastic elements and used to build a numeric method. The simulation features the possibility of predicting essential parameters of the electrospinning process and the results are in good agreement with those of other numeric studies of electrospinning, which modeled this process based on axial direction.