Chitosan based nanofibers, review

Chitin and chitosan are natural polymers with a huge potential in numerous fields, namely, biomedical, biological, and many industrial applications such as waste water treatment due to the fact that they can absorb and chelate many metal cations. Electrospinning is a growing field of research to produce submicron fibers with promising applications in biomedical fields like tissue engineering scaffolds and wound healing capabilities. Both chitin and chitosan polymers were found to be hard to electrospun, however, many researchers manage to produce nano-fibers using special solvents; for example, 90% acetic acid was found to reduce the surface tension making electrospinning feasible. Mixtures of organic acids were also experimented to produce homogenous and uniform fibers. Bigger attention was given to electrospinning of their soluble derivatives such as dibutyryl and carboxymethyl chitin. More derivatives of chitosan were investigated to produce nano-fibers such as hexanoyl, polyethyleneglycol, carboxymethyl, and a series of quaternized chitosan derivatives. The obtained nano-fibers were found to have much better qualities than normal chitosan fibers. Several polymer blends of chitin/chitosan with many commercial polymers were found to be amenable for electrospinning producing uniform beads free fibers. The review surveys the various approaches for successful electrospinning of chitin, chitosan, their derivatives, and blends with several other polymers. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.