Development of Electrospun WE43 Magnesium Alloy-Like Compound

Metallic structures are conventionally fabricated with high temperature/deformation processes resulting the smallest possible microscopic structures in the order of several hundreds of micrometer. Therefore, to obtain structures with fibers smaller than 100 μm, those are unsuitable. In this study, electrospinning, a fiber fabrication technique commonly used for polymers, was adopted to fabricate a WE43 magnesium alloy-like fibrous structure. The aim is to adopt metallic WE43 alloy to regenerative medicine using tissue engineering approach by mimicking its composition inside of a fibrous structure. The solution required for electrospinning was obtained with water soluble nitrates of elements in WE43 alloy, and PVP or PVA were added to obtain a spinnable viscosity which was pyrolised away during heat treatment. Electrospinning parameters were optimized with naked-eye observations and SEM as 1.5 g salts and 5 wt.% PVA containing solution prepared at 90 °C and electrospun under 30 kV from a distance of 12-15 cm with a feeding rate of 5 μl/min. Then the samples were subjected to a multi-step heat treatment under argon to remove the polymer and calcinate the nitrates into oxides which was designed based on thermal analyses and reaction kinetics calculations as 6 h at 230 °C, 8.5 h at 390 °C, 5 h at 465 °C, 80 h at 500 °C and 10 h at 505 °C, consecutively. The characterizations conducted in terms of structure, composition and crystallinity with XRD, XPS, EDX and SEM showed that it is possible to obtain MgYNdZrO (empirical) fibers with the same composition as WE43 in sub-millimeter sizes using this approach.