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

加压回转工艺是本资助申请的重点，是一种新兴技术，利用离心力和动态流体流持续喷射出先进的功能材料。该技术在克服现有技术的局限性方面显示出巨大的潜力，以制造可以安全，一致和具有成本效益地扩大规模的功能材料和结构。因此，在过去的5年中，加压旋转和几个姐妹工艺（灌注旋转、熔融加压旋转、压力耦合灌注旋转）已经被开发并应用于制备用于不同应用的功能材料。这项研究的总体动机是制造各种各样的“芯-鞘”结构，这些结构仅仅因为缺乏创新的制造而没有在功能性应用（例如医疗保健）中被充分商业化利用。该项目的总体目标是开发加压回转作为有效制造多材料芯鞘结构的新手段。因此，该项目的一个非常重要的方面是开发一种基于探索性实验证据的加压旋转技术，以大规模生成核鞘结构。一种新创建的包含两个腔室的探索性装置已被用于制造各种聚合物纳米纤维，其中在水溶液和非水溶液中的不同聚合物在各种浓度、压力和旋转速度下作为芯和鞘组分。此外，还使用该装置制备了负载抗菌金属纳米颗粒的纳米纤维。用高速摄像机和显微镜观察了核鞘结构的形成过程。因此，建议的研究侧重于开发一种新的高成品率的设备，用于制造分层芯鞘结构的基础上，我们现有的初步设备。此外，相当大的努力将致力于分析新的过程，以作出定量评估，以了解理论问题。重点研究微纳米尺度下核-鞘纤维和核-壳胶囊的形成。功能化那些添加其他有机、无机和颗粒材料产生的芯鞘结构将是一个重要的特征。加工后的芯鞘结构将采用先进的工具进行表征，以探索其独特的物理、化学和生物学特性。

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.