Design, Fabrication, and Testing of an Electrospinning Apparatus for the Deposition of PMMA Polymer for Biomedical Applications

This paper describes the successful design and fabrication of a deposition system for synthesis and assembly of nanoscale and submicron sized fibers of poly(methylmethacrylate)(PMMA) polymer. To optimize the electrospinning deposition process, the distance between the needle and the electrically grounded substrate, the applied voltage, and the concentration of PMMA polymer in the solution were varied. PMMA fibers as small as 500 nanometers were observed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The chemical signature of PMMA was confirmed for best quality and retention of chemistry using Fourier Transformed Infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). PMMA is a biocompatible polymer, and nanofibers of PMMA are key building blocks for scaffolds and other biomanufacturing applications, such as bioprinting for regenerative medicine and tissue engineering of synthetic organs (Mo, 2004)

Maxwell-Stefan diffusion asymptotic for gas mixtures in non-isothermal setting

A mathematical model is proposed where the classical Maxwell-Stefan diffusion model for gas mixtures is coupled to an advection-type equation for the temperature of the physical system. This coupled system is derived from first principles in the sense that the starting point of our analysis is a system of Boltzmann equations for gaseous mixtures. We perform an asymptotic analysis on the Boltzmann model under diffuse scaling to arrive at the proposed coupled system.Comment: 14 page