Nov 24 2010
The November issue of Materials Science and Technology (MST) focuses on ‘Electrospun nanofibres and electrospun nanoporous materials: reality, potential and challenges’ through a selection of articles and reviews that report on the promising development of nanotechnology in the area of electrospinning.
The issue provides an overview of the considerable efforts on the development of new methods for the production of nanofibres in the past decade, and the challenges that still remain. Members of the Institute enjoy free access to this issue and all of the Institute’s refereed journals.
The papers published by Maney in this special issue of Materials Science and Technology (November 2010, Volume 26, Number 11) were specially commissioned by Guest Editor, Professor Ji-Huan He of Donghua University, China, an internationally recognised centre of textiles expertise, and his Co-Guest Editors, Lan Xu and Santi Maensiri. Professor Ji-Huan He’s introductory editorial is free to view online and provides an interesting opening to the issue and the area of electrospinning. Members of the Institute can enjoy free access to this special issue and all MST issues back to 1967 by logging onto the IOM3 website, then visiting www.iom3.org/journal-access.
Electrospinning, the process of producing polymer nanofibres and nanoporous microspheres, typically produces low yields with poor mechanical characteristics and requires high energy input. Drawing on inspiration from nature, a process using bubbles of polymer solutions, similar to the nanobubbles observed during the spider silk spinning process, has been developed to fabricate nanofibres with high yields and of a consistent diameter. The special issue includes a collection of original refereed research papers and reviews by well established researchers in the field of nanotechnology, on topics from spider spinning to bubble electrospinning, and from the hierarchical structure of wool fibre and tendons to super carbon nanotubes.
These nanofibres have numerous potential applications, from tissue scaffolds with tailored bioactivity, to ferrite nanofibres for next generation magnetic storage devices and magnetic fluids, to filtration and specific sorption. Electrospun structures may exhibit the hierarchical and fractal structures characteristic of natural materials and the remarkable mechanical and transport properties these structures confer are also examined.
The November issue also contains a perspective on aberration corrected and monochromated environmental TEM by Hansen and co-authors at the recently established Center for Nanoscopy at the Technical University at Denmark. Through a series of case studies, the authors detail the exceptional resolution and in situ capabilities of modern electron microscopes.
Other MST special issues in 2010 have addressed grain boundaries at high temperature and applications of electron backscatter diffraction. April’s issue also included a series of papers in memory of Professor Sir Robert Honeycombe.
Edited by Professor John Knott, with Professors Andy Horsewell, Devesh Misra, Valerie Randle and Philip Withers as Associate Editors, MST publishes original research papers and reviews from an international authorship. The journal has a particular interest in the continuum from understanding and modelling of process routes leading to the generation of microstructure, through to its characterisation. For further information, including how to submit to the journal, visit the journal homepage. For the latest content, sign up for journal TOC alerts. MST completed its first quarter-century of publication at the end of 2009. To mark this milestone, a series of ‘25 year perspectives’ were commissioned for the 2010 volume. The perspectives survey topics where notable developments have occurred over MST’s lifetime.