Electrospinning technology for scalable manufacturing of polymer-based nanofibers filters with high-performance in submicron particle filtration and bactericidal activity in advanced face mask

In the recent years, Electrospinning (ES) proved to be an easy and advantageous technique to design functionalized nanofibers mats based on natural and synthetic polymers as well as hybrid bioactive nanomaterials, which can be easily implemented for the realization of advanced wearable healthcare devices, scaffold in tissue engineering, energy harvesting system, etc. In particular, the great advantages to obtain nanofibers with tailored diameter sizes and surface characteristic properties, down to the nano scale, has made this methos commercially attractive to produce ecofriendly and more sustainable high filtering devices for facemask application, especially in the last years when the pandemic outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have brought to a mass consumption of personal protective equipment (PPE) that resulted in a potential source of further contamination from bacteria or virus. The use of modified electrospinning set-up can be an innovative way to manufacture nanofiber-based membrane showing high filtering performance against submicron pollution particles and suitable antibacterial properties for tackling the current issues from bacterial contamination on PPE surfaces to the reusability of both disposable single use facemask and respirator’s filters.