Fiber formation mechanisms of jet-assisted wet spinning (JAWS)

Abstract

In fiber spinning of photopolymers, surface tension limits the diameter of the fiber that can be produced due to the Rayleigh–Plateau instability. Submerging a pre-fiber jet in a miscible environment liberates the system from capillary effects, thus allowing the jet to be stretched into thin threads without instability. In this work, we systematically investigated a spinning method using miscible liquids, called jet-assisted wet spinning (JAWS), where stretching is achieved by a nearby submerged liquid jet. The diameter of the pre-fiber jet is a function of its flow rate and position relative to the assisting submerged liquid jet. A particular case where the main jet is modeled as the Landau–Squire jet is used to demonstrate the tracer-like thinning behavior of the pre-fiber jet. Experiments show that buoyancy has a significant impact on the pre-fiber jet diameter because of its influence on the entrainment trajectory. Overall, our results demonstrate the potential for the parallelization of JAWS for high-throughput fiber production.