Numerical simulation of electrospinning process in commercial and in-house software PAK

The aim of this research was to investigate if it is possible to implicitly determine the homogeneity of the obtained electrospun fibers based on jet shape during electrospinning. Experiments were performed with 10 wt% PVA solution, and four variations in process parameters were investigated in order to examine their effect on fiber structure. Data obtained during experiments were used as input for computational simulation. The simulation results, both using commercial ANSYS and in-house software PAK, show good agreement with experiments in terms of outcome-no fiber differences in experiments were present when different voltage pairs were used, and similar jet shapes were obtained during simulations. Shapes of the electric field potential for all the used voltage pairs were very similar, due to the uniformity of the field, which is in agreement with the experiment, as no differences in fiber structure are observed in these cases. This confirms the hypothesis that based on jet shape during electrospinning, it is possible to implicitly determine the homogeneity of the obtained electrospun fibers. Differences that may occur between experiments and simulation can be a result of simplifications in simulations, influence of uniform and non-uniform electric field etc. This kind of two-phase simulation could be useful in reducing the trial-and-error approach and maintenance costs in electrospinning experiments. (paper)