On the way to clean and safe electrospinning-green electrospinning: emulsion and suspension electrospinning

For the process of electrospinning, either water or organic solvents are used as solvents depending upon the solubility of the materials to be spun. For many applications, such as tissue engineering, biomedical, agricultural, etc., the toxicity of the organic solvent used could be highly critical. Besides this, the high viscosities of such polymer solutions even for low weight per cent (wt%) polymer solutions (generally for conventional electrospinning a maximum of 10-15wt% polymer solution can be used) prevent high polymer concentrations and thereby reduces the productivity of the electrospinning process. This justifies the need for an approach which would alleviate concerns regarding safety, toxicology, and environmental problems, in addition, would also overcome the restrictions of too high polymer concentrations of polymer solutions. The answer could be suspension electrospinning. The term suspension electrospinning is referred to the electrospinning of aqueous dispersions (lattices) of water insoluble polymers and is defined in this article as Green Electrospinning. The present mini review highlights the efforts in this promising area of Emulsion and Suspension Electrospinning including their chances and limitations. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.