: In the past decade, electrospinning has attracted tremendous interests in many research fields simply because it provides a facile and effective means in producing ultrafine fibers with diameters ranging from microns down to a few nano meters. Alginate is an interesting natural biopolymer for many of its merits and good biological properties. In this research, we investigated electrospinning of sodium alginate in two parts. In the first part, the pure alginate system was studied and then effects of additives such as acid, surfactant and some organic solvents to improve the spinnability of the polymer solution was also investigated. The results showed that water solution of sodium alginate can not be electrospun into ultrafine fibers and even by introducing additives in the polymer solution was not spinnable by this technique. In the second part, blended systems were examined. Sodium alginate was mixed with poly(vinyl alcohol) and poly(ethylene oxide) separately, and under optimized conditions, they were electrospun. The morphology and diameter of the electrospun fibers were observed and determined with the use of an optical microscope and a scanning electron microscope(SEM). The SEM photographs indicated that the alginate(2%w/v)-PVA(8%w/v) blended system in the volume ratio 70:30 and the alginate(2%w/v)-PEO(8%w/v) blended system in the volume ratio 50:50 could be spun to homogenous fibers with average diameter 118.3 nm(diameter distribution, 75.8-204 nm) and 99.1 nm(diameter distribution, 71-122 nm), respectively. Rheological studies showed a strong dependence of spinnability and fiber morphology on solution viscosity and thus on alginate-to-synthetic polymer(PEO or PVA) blend ratios. In addition, FTIR technique has been used to characterize the miscibility of polymer blends.
