Porosity Percentage Assessment of Melt Electrospun PLA

Melt electrospun materials are by far less explored than solution based ones, due to the challenges that come from both temperature and electrical voltage simultaneously. Within this respect, the fibers produced by melt electrospinning are much thicker than 1 micron. This paper focuses on the design of polylactic acid (PLA) microfilament materials melt spun on Spraybase, with previously generated 2D models in three different geometries. The PLA materials have difference in terms of filament densities (distance between the filaments of 0.5, 1 and 2 mm) and filament positions (vertical, vertical/horizontal, diagonal or at the angle less than 90°). The porosity of the materials is determined using microscope images of the samples and by analyzing their pore sizes and total void volume in ImageJ. The porosity is an important parameter that affects the thermal comfort evaluation of materials and it is dependent upon their e.g. thickness, filament diameter, filament distribution or geometry and pore sizes.