Biodegradable Antimicrobial Gauzes Enabled by Dry Spinning Poly(Butylene Adipate Terephthalate) (PBAT) Fibers

Biodegradable antimicrobial gauzes are environmentally friendly medical dressings taking essential role in the protection and healing of wounds. Poly (butylene adipate terephthalate) (PBAT) offers a promising platform for exploiting biodegradable antimicrobial gauzes attributed to its exceptional biodegradability, biocompatibility, processability, and flexibility. To date, most work is focused on utilizing electrostatic spinning to fabricate PBAT antimicrobial gauzes. The PBAT antimicrobial gauzes exhibit unsatisfactory tensile strength and breaking elongation restricting their practical application. Moreover, electrostatic spinning technology requires high-cost equipment and presents relatively lower production efficiency which is not suitable for large-scale production. Herein, a dry spinning technology is reported that can manufacture PBAT fibers with superb mechanical properties (tensile strength 14 MPa, breaking elongation 1600%) in large-scale and high-efficiency (151 m·min⁻¹). The antimicrobial gauzes are achieved by loading commercially available and used antibacterial agent, tannic acid (TA), to the surface of the textiles prepared from the PBAT fibers by the traditional knitting process. The antibacterial result demonstrates that the developed antimicrobial gauzes display a remarkable inhibitory effect on the growth the Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Escherichia coli (E. coli) which are common bacteria that cause wound infections.