Bio-electrospinfabrication: from production to applications

Biofabrication is a technology that has the potential to emerge as the leading manufacturing paradigm of the 21st century with the contributions of engineering, biology, and materials science. Electrospinning, one of the biofabrication techniques, has arisen as a simple and cost-effective fiber-forming technology, since its discovery by Formhals in 1934. Recently, electrospun fibers have gained much attention due to their wide range of uses in diverse application fields. Especially, for manufacturing scaffolds to be used in tissue engineering (TE) applications, electrospun fibers are very promising alternatives that mimic the extracellular matrix (ECM) for cellular progression. However, this technique also has drawbacks such as jet instability, low productivity, the requirement of using specialized equipment, and high voltage besides environmental concerns related to use of organic solvents. Hence, new design strategies and additive manufacturing (AM) approaches are still needed that allow production of many different types of scaffolds as required and so, to precisely control the morphology and diameter of the produced three-dimensional (3D) materials. In this respect, this chapter provides the state of the art of electrospinning by categorizing it into melt electrospinning, solution electrospinning, centrifugal electrospinning, cryoelectrospinning, and near-field electrospinning from the aspects of TE.