Fabrication and characterization of three-dimensional nanofiber membrane of PCL-MWCNTs by electrospinning

The uniform and highly smooth nanofibers of poly(c-caprolactone) (PCL) composited with different multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) content (ranging from 0.1 wt.% to 5 wt.%) were successfully prepared by electrospinning method without the occurrence of bead defects in this study. The PCL-0.5 wt%MWCNTs nanofiber membrane exhibited the maximum tensile strength (about 1.42 MPa), which was increased by 46% compared with that of electrospun pure PCL nanofiber membrane. Moreover, the PCL-MWCNTs nanofiber membrane exhibited three-dimensional porous structure with a high porosity over 90%. The average diameter of PCL-MWCNTs nanofibers decreased with the addition of MWCNTs and there was a narrow diameter distribution in the range of 52-244 nm when the amount of MWCNTs was 0.5 wt.%. Compared with pure PCL nanofibers, PCL-MWCNTs nanofibers showed accelerating degradation behavior. In addition, the cytotoxicity results revealed that the electrospun PCL-MWCNTs nanofiber membranes possessed good in vitro biocompatibility, and hemolysis and kinetic clotting tests indicated that the PCL nanofiber membranes did not enhance blood coagulation after the addition of MWCNTs. It can be concluded that such kind of electrospun PCL-MWCNTs nanofibers may be promising candidate for tissue engineering scaffold application. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.