Real-time monitoring and closed-loop control system for multi-jet electrospinning with coaxial laser

The real-time monitoring and control of multi-jet electrospinning is significant to promote the quality of produced nanofiber membranes. In this paper, a multi-jet electrospinning system with coaxial laser was established to promote the jet visibility, which was beneficial for the accurate identification of jet features. A multi-jet feature recognition algorithm including the modules of image pre-processing, the jet feature segmentation and the jet feature identification was designed, and the processing time for the image processing to detect the multi-jet features of Taylor cone areas and visible jet lengths could be shortened to within 40ms. Then, the judgement rule of multi-jet ejection mode was designed and the multi-jet ejection mode was divided into four states according to the recognized jet feature parameters. Based on the identified multi-jet features, a closed-loop control system was designed with the applied voltage as the adjustment parameter. Through experimental verification, nanofiber membranes of good quality with uniform fiber diameter distribution were successfully obtained. This work has significant potential to promote the quality of produced nanofiber membranes and to accelerate the industrial applications of electrospinning technology.