I took part in the seminar. The presentation was done by Professor Wei Pan of the State Key Laboratory of New Ceramics & Fine Processing of Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
It was an interesting experience. In the presentation, I saw many of the papers and works which I have read in the last 3-4 years about nanotechnology. It seemed a review of articles by the author himself. He tried to induce that the production and working with electrospinning and electrospun nanofibers are very easy.
Because I have some experiences in electrospinning, I knew the easiness and hardness of working with it. He showed a large mat of nanofibrous layer in the presentation and induced that it is easy to produce and handle. I agree with him that producing a nanofibrous material and collecting the fibers on a collectors is easy, but there is an other hard job. You often need to separate the fibrous mat from the collector. And, this job is very hard. If you do not let it to cut, usually some part of the layer remain on the foil. When we speak about nano-scale effects, we cannot neglect the lost mass because it leads to an lack of uniformity in the mat in terms of deterrent thicknesses. Researchers usually use some specific materials to decrease the stickiness between nanofibers and the collector. For instance, I use silicon spray to make it easier to peal the nanofiber.
I asked this question from the professor, but unfortunately he did not use any special material in between of the collector and nanofibrous mat.