Creation and Exploitation of Pressurised Gyration to Manufacture Core-Sheath Structures:

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Pressurised gyration processes, which are the focus of this grant application is an emerging technique that utilises centrifugal force and the dynamic fluid flow to jet out advanced functional materials consistently. This technique has shown great potential in overcoming the limitations of the existing techniques to manufacture functional materials and structures that can safely, consistently and cost-effectively be up-scaled. Thus in the past 5 years pressurised gyration, and several sister-processes (infusion gyration, melt pressurised gyration, pressure-coupled infusion gyration) have been developed and applied to prepare functional materials for different applications. The overall motivation of this research is to manufacture a wide variety of "core-sheath" structures, that are not fully exploited commercially in functional applications (e.g. healthcare) simply because of lack of innovative manufacturing. The overall aim of the project is to develop pressurised gyration as a novel means of effective manufacturing of multi-material core-sheath structures. Therefore, a very significant aspect of this project is to develop a pressurised gyration technique based on exploratory experimental evidence, to generate core-sheath structures on a large scale. A newly created exploratory device containing two chambers has been used to manufacture a wide range of polymer nanofibres with different polymers in both aqueous and non-aqueous solutions as core and sheath components at various concentrations, pressures and rotating speeds. In addition antibacterial metallic nanoparticles loaded nanofibres were also produced using this device. The manufacturing of core-sheath structure has been demonstrated by using a high speed camera and microscopy. Thus, the proposed research pays attention on developing a new high yield device for manufacturing layered core-sheath structures based on our existing preliminary device. Also a considerable effort will be devoted to analyse the new process to make quantitative assessment in order to understand the theoretical issues. It will focus on investigating the forming of core-sheath fibres and core-shell capsules from micro-nanoscale. Functionalising those core-sheath structures produced with additions of other, organic, inorganic and particulate materials will be an important feature. The processed core-sheath structures will be characterised with advanced tools to explore their unique physical, chemical and biological properties.