Plenary Lecture
Process of Electrospinning with an Emphasis to the Rheological Behaviour of PVB Solutions
Dr. Petr Filip
Institute of Hydrodynamics
Acadademy of Sciences
Prague, Czech Republic
E-mail: filip@ih.cas.cz
Abstract: The process of electrospinning is a low-cost procedure that creates nanofibres through an electrically charged jet of polymer solution or polymer melt. Electrospinning process consists schematically of a pipette holding the polymer solution, two electrodes, a DC voltage supply in the kV range, and a grounded collector. The high voltage causes drawing of the polymer drop from the tip of the pipette into a fibre. The electrically charged jets are collected as a web of fibres on the surface of a grounded collector. By virtue of their high surface-to-volume ratio, the electrospun nanofibre sheets are used as protective clothing and filtration, tissue scaffolding and other biomedical applications, reinforcement in composites, and optical, electronic and high performance applications. The emphasis will be paid to correlation between electrorheological behaviour of various polyvinylbutyral (PVB) solutions and quality of the corresponding nanofibre webs.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Petr Filip graduated from the Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Czech Republic in 1976. He completed his Ph.D. study at the Institute of Mathematics, Acad. Sci. Czech Rep., his Ph.D. Thesis was devoted to oscillatory solutions of partial differential equations. Since 1980 he has been with the Institute of Hydrodynamics, Acad. Sci. Czech Rep., Prague, for many years as a head of the Department of Chemical Engineering where he was interested in fluid mechanics, especially theory of jets and mixing. Later on he was appointed to the position of a scientific secretary (up to now), at present his sphere of interest is rheology (flow of non-Newtonian liquids). He is an author (co-author) of more than 100 contributions published in international journals and conference proceedings.