New spinning process produces ultrafine, ultrastrong, ultratough low-cost nanofibres

Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston have developed a new process to spin fibres which, they claim, turns ordinary polyethylene (probably the most widely produced and cheapest of all polymers) into fibres only nanometres in diameter but which outperform even the most specialised materials in terms of strength and toughness. Normally, these properties are subject to a trade-off, but the new process, called gel electrospinning, manages to achieve both at high levels, the team claims.

Gel electrospinning combines aspects of two established processes. In gel spinning, a fibre is drawn mechanically from a bath of a polymer gel; and in electrospinning, fibres are drawn from a liquid using electromagnetic fields rather than a physical mechanism to provide the force that draws out the thread. In a paper in the Journal of Materials Science, Jay Park and Gregory Rutledge of MIT’s department of chemical engineering suggest that the very narrowness of the fibres is the key to their extraordinary physical properties.