Degradation of polycaprolactone electrospun materials - methods of analysis

Abstract

Biodegradable electrospun materials are widely used for medical application. Polycaprolatone is polymer suitable for electrospinning technology and is very often used to create nanofibrous scaffolds for tissue engineering. The time to disintegration or biodegradation of such materials is very important here. However, testing is not entirely easy. It is not possible to create exactly body-like conditions in vitro. Moreover, it is not easy to find suitable analytical methods that would show exactly what happens in the nanofibrous polycaprolactone electrospun samples at certain stages of degradation, ie how the internal structure of decaying nanofibers changes. This paper describes the traditional use of methods for testing polycaprolatone nanofibers by enzymatically catalysed degradation. Morphological changes are studied using scanning electron microscope images. However, it also offers a non-traditional analysis of polycaprolactone electrospun materials using the ssNMR method.