Microcontact printing and lithographic patterning of electrospun nanofibers

We describe a method for printing electrospun nanofibers from a collector onto another substrate. The electrospinning collector that we used is made of a thin layer of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) on glass with or without patterned electrodes, allowing the fabrication of either aligned or randomly deposited nanofibers. Afterwards, the electrospun fibers are printed onto a glass substrate, and such a process can be repeatedly used to obtain multilayer fibers with a good reproducibility. We also show a postprocessing method for the pattern formation of electrospun nanofibers by using standard photolithography and reactive ion etching techniques, thereby providing a way of fabricating microarrays of single fibers or distributed fiber matrices.