Investigation of wicking phenomenon and tensile properties in three‐layer composite nanofibrous PA / PLLA yarn

Spinning the Future: The Convergence of Nanofiber Technologies and Yarn Fabrication

The rapid advancement in nanofiber technologies has revolutionized the domain of yarn materials, marking a significant leap in textile technology. This review dissects the nexus between cutting-edge nanofiber technologies and yarn manufacturing, aiming to illuminate the pathway toward engineering advanced textiles with unparalleled functionality. It first discusses the fundamentals of nanofiber assemblies and spinning techniques, primarily focusing on electrospinning, centrifugal spinning, and blow spinning. Additionally, the study delves into integrating nanofiber spinning technologies with traditional and modern yarn fabrication principles, elucidating the design principles that underlie the creation of yarns incorporating nanofibers. Twisting technologies are explored to examine how they can be optimized and adapted for incorporating nanofibers, thus enabling the production of innovative nanofiber-based yarns. Special attention is given to scalable strategies like centrifugal and blow spinning, which are spotlighted for their efficiency and scalability in fabricating nanofiber yarns. This review further analyses recently developed nanofiber yarn applications, including wearable sensors, biomedical devices, moisture management textiles, and energy harvesting and storage devices. We finally present a forward-looking perspective to address unresolved issues in nanofiber-based yarn technologies.

State-of-the-art review of advanced electrospun nanofiber yarn-based textiles for biomedical applications

The pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has made biotextiles, including face masks and protective clothing, quite familiar in our daily lives. Biotextiles are one broad category of textile products that are beyond our imagination. Currently, biotextiles have been routinely utilized in various biomedical fields, like daily protection, wound healing, tissue regeneration, drug delivery, and sensing, to improve the health and medical conditions of individuals. However, these biotextiles are commonly manufactured with fibers with diameters on the micrometer scale (> 10 μm). Recently, nanofibrous materials have aroused extensive attention in the fields of fiber science and textile engineering because the fibers with nanoscale diameters exhibited obviously superior performances, such as size and surface/interface effects as well as optical, electrical, mechanical, and biological properties, compared to microfibers. A combination of innovative electrospinning techniques and traditional textile-forming strategies opens a new window for the generation of nanofibrous biotextiles to renew and update traditional microfibrous biotextiles. In the last two decades, the conventional electrospinning device has been widely modified to generate nanofiber yarns (NYs) with the fiber diameters less than 1000 nm. The electrospun NYs can be further employed as the primary processing unit for manufacturing a new generation of nano-textiles using various textile-forming strategies. In this review, starting from the basic information of conventional electrospinning techniques, we summarize the innovative electrospinning strategies for NY fabrication and critically discuss their advantages and limitations. This review further covers the progress in the construction of electrospun NY-based nanotextiles and their recent applications in biomedical fields, mainly including surgical sutures, various scaffolds and implants for tissue engineering, smart wearable bioelectronics, and their current and potential applications in the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end, this review highlights and identifies the future needs and opportunities of electrospun NYs and NY-based nanotextiles for clinical use.