A Literature Investigation about Electrospinning and Nanofibers: Historical Trends, Current Status and Future Challenges

The development of new fibrilar materials based on electrospinning (ES) technique has a notable history of nearly four centuries of discoveries and results. The eletrospinning manufacturing is one of the most widely reported methods for nanofiber (NF) manufacturing, providing security, high quality and productivity. In spite of the first patent about electrospinning has been applied in April 5th, 1900 by John Francis Cooley, a historical perspective (since 1600s) about this amazing discovery represents an important step for future applications. Nanofibers have been considered one of the top interesting fundamental study objects for academicians, and greatest intriguing business materials for modern industry. As a consequence, lucrative organizations and companies have explored the relevance of nanofibers. In this paper, the quantity of published manuscripts and patent inventions is presented and the correlation of research activities to the production of new electrospinning materials is shown. China and the United States have been leading in electrospinning and nanofibers development. The company triumph is mostly dependent on applications improvement relevant for broader business society. A dramatic rise of interest in nanofibers produced by electrospinning technique has been confirmed due to the publication data, author’s affiliation, keywords, and essential characterization procedures. Is has been shown that the number of publications on electrospinning and nanofibers researches from academic institutions is higher than industrial laboratories. More than 1,891 patents using the term “electrospinning” and 2,960 with the term “nanofibers” according to the European Patent Office at title or abstract have been filed around the world up to 2013. These numbers just continue to increase along with worldwide ES-related sales. Curiously, for the same period 11,973 electrospinning documents and 18,679 nanofibers-related (mainly manuscripts) were published considering the Scopus database with the same terms in the title, abstract or using keywords. Thus, statistically, there are more published manuscripts worldwide than patents for both keywords. Keywords: Electrospinning, history, nanofibers, nanotechnology, patent, technology.