10.2417/spepro.006856 Fabrication of electrically conductive and antibacterial biocomposite materials Mohammad Taghi Satoungar, Saeid Fattahi, Hamed Azizi, and Mohammad Khajeh Mehrizi A direct electrospinning process was used to produce polylactic acid/silver nanowire fibers that exhibit a core–shell structure. In the past, the development of electrically and thermally conductive polymers has been focused mainly on intrinsically conductive poly- mers such as polyaniline. As an alternative, several different methods— including the use of nanofiller materials in less-conductive polymers— have also been studied. 1–7 Indeed, the use of nanofillers in biomaterials has become popular in various technologies. In particular, polylactic acid (PLA) is a good polymer for use in biomedical applications and the packaging industry because it is both biocompatible and biodegrad- able (whereas polyaniline is harmful in some applications). 8 Likewise, 1D metal nanostructures—including silver nanowires (AgNWs)—have gained a large amount of recent attention because of their high electri- cal and thermal conductivity properties. 9–13 To date, however, there has been no investigation into the electrical properties of PLA/AgNW bio- composites. Although the use of NWs as nanoelectronics and nanosensors has previously been studied, there is still substantial scope for further in- vestigations of AgNWs in biopolymer composites. For example, the an- tibacterial properties of several different PLA composites have recently been investigated. These included PLA/chitosan composite nanofibers 8 and PLA nanofibrous webs that incorporated triclosan/cyclodextrin complexes. 14 In addition, it has been found that powerful antibacte- rial activity can be produced with silver nanoparticle/PLA nanofiber composites when the size of the silver particles was increased from the microscale to the nanoscale. 15 In our work we have therefore used a direct electrospinning synthesis method—in which a polymer solution is charged to a high voltage to produce fibers—to fabricate PLA/AgNW biocomposite fibers for the first time and to investigate their physical, electrical, and antimicro- bial properties. 16 In the first step of our synthesis process we prepared two different solutions. In the first solution, AgNWs were dispersed Figure 1. (a) Field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) image of silver nanowire (AgNW) particles. (b) Transmission electron microscope (TEM) image of a single AgNW. Continued on next page