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With the growing interest in material technologies incorporating bio-based constituents, substitutes to both conventional polymer foams and their synthetic reinforcements are being sought. In this article, we characterise the physical, mechanical, thermal and environmental resistance properties of novel syntactic foams that are based on silkworm cocoons as natural, hollow particulate fillers for a...
We compare the nonlinear mechanical properties of silks under load with the quasi-static and isothermal dynamic mechanical properties of nylon as well as human hair. For silk and nylon, the dynamic storage modulus increases with increasing static load, while the quasi-static modulus decreases considerably through yield. However, the modulus of hair decreases irreversibly for both loading conditions...
Silks have a great potential as sustainable, ecologically benign commercial polymers. Here we discuss this fascinating bio-material by merging the biologist's with the polymer scientist's views i.e. combine insights into the characterisation and understanding of evolved structure, property and function in natural silk proteins with the broad scope of applied disciplines ranging from molecular modelling...
We present a novel method for calculating degradation kinetics in polymers. Our calculations directly use the dissociation energy of chemical bonds in a polymer chain to predict weight loss as a function of time and temperature in an Arrhenius-type activation function. The novelty lies in quantifying the thermal energy term for skeletal bonds in the chain backbone in the activation function that initiates...
Several different solvent systems are commonly used to dissolve Bombyx mori silk fibroin to prepare regenerated silk membranes and fibers though differences in the behavior of these solvents have not been fully investigated. Here we compare the effects of four of these on the rheology of silk fibroin solutions and on protein secondary structure as revealed by FTIR spectroscopy of cast membranes. The...
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