The process was carried out in a ClimateZone climate control cabinet (a1-safetech Luton, UK) which allows the process to be performed under controlled atmospheric conditions. The temperature and relative humidity (RH) were selected and kept constant throughout each electrospinning event from a temperature range: 17°C to 35°C (resolution of 0.1°C), and a humidity range: 20%RH to 80%RH (resolution of 1%RH).
5mL polymer solution loaded into a sterile syringe and attach to a Harvard PHD 4400 syringe pump (Harvard Apparatus Ltd. Kent, UK), with a programmable flow rate range from 0.0001 μL/h up to 13.25 L/h, to deliver the polymer solution to a 0.5mm ID stainless steel micro needle. The pump is set at a flowrate of 800μL/h. The tip of the needle was placed 30 cm above the grounded collector plate. The collector plate used was a rectangular (20 x 26 cm) aluminium foil covered earth steel plate. The process was run for 1 hour. These conditions were selected based on preliminary experiments and are known to yield solid dry nanofibers with diameters from 0.1μm - 1μm.
Samples for the defined parameters were electrospun on 3 different days allowing for the comparison of fibre consistency.