Cellulose constitutes the most abundant renewable polymer resource available today and has been used for centuries in the form of fibers or derivatives for a wide range of products. In the form of fiber mats, cellulose has been modified with ligands to be used as an affinity membrane for the separation of biological active proteins. The binding capacity of the membrane is expected to depend on the surface ligand density, length of the ligand spacer arm, available surface area and the size of the membrane pores. In this work, the size of the pores, formed by the spaces between fibers, will be controlled with the alignment of the fibers produced by electrospinning, a novel process used for the forming of polymer fibers with micro/nano diameters, in which the viscosity of the solution is the main factor that control the fiber diameter. This method is based on the action generated from the electrostatic forces under a polymeric solution jet (in this case, cellulose acetate) generating its deformation until submicron scale diameters and solidification over the metallic collector. In this work, the amount of cellulose acetate fibers  deposited on top of a substrate filter with different pore sizes is varied in order to increase the available surface area of attachment of ligands of bioactive proteins.

Characterization of cellulose membrane filters deposited by electrospinning

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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