The healing processes of the skin, such as recovery from a burn wound or the stages of an infection, often show specific pH-changes. Accurate measurement and optical reporting of the pH level of the skin could provide a useful monitoring tool. pH-responsivity with a visual response can easily be introduced in various kinds of (co)polymers or fabrics by introducing a suitable halochromic dye. Electrospinning allows for the fabrication of nanofibrous, nonwovens of e.g. polyamide 6 or chitosan, that have shown to promote wound healing through their nanoscaled structure. The most common method of introducing a pH-responsivity in these types of materials is by mixing the dye directly in the electrospinning mixture, creating so called dye-doped nanofibers. These fibres however mostly suffer of dye leaching causing toxicological effects. This project proposes the fabrication of a halochromic textile by blend spinning of a pH-responsive polymer with polyamide 6, hereby reducing the leaching of the dye by covalently incorporating it into the fibre.We report the successful fabrication of pH-responsive nanofibrous materials using blend electrospinning of PA6 with P(HEA-co-DR1-A) showing a shift in the UV-VIS spectrum of orange to pink upon variation of the pH from 1 to 0 (see figure). These nanofibrous materials show severely reduced leaching of the dye from these materials compared to the DR1(-A) dye-doped materials proving the proposed concept.

Blend electrospinning as suitable fabrication method for stable pH-responsive textiles

248th National Meeting (2014)

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