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Updated: Dec 10, 2025
Microfluidic Dry-spinning and Characterization of Regenerated Silk Fibroin Fibers
Published on: September 4, 2017
Processing Strategies to Obtain Highly Porous Silk Fibroin Structures with Tailored Microstructure and Molecular
A Reizabal1, C M Costa2, P G Saiz3
1BCMaterials, Basque Center for Materials, Applications and Nanostructures, UPV/EHU Science Park, 48940, Leioa, Spain; Departamento de Química Física, Facultad de Ciencia y Tecnología, Universidad del País Vasco/EHU, Apdo. 644, Bilbao, Spain.
Abstract:
The present work reports on the control of silk fibroin (SF) porous structures performance through various processing methods. The study includes the analysis of two dissolving techniques (CaCl2/H2O/EtOH ternary and LiBr/H2O binary solutions), three regeneration methods (gelation, lyophilization and gas foaming) and one post-processing (EtOH). In all the cases, followed steps lead to SF structures with porosity values above 94% and large surface areas. Also, results about samples microstructure, secondary organization, crystallinity and water behavior, reveal a direct correlation between processing and SF properties. Thanks to the achieved progress, the SF varying porous structures were evaluated for metalloids (As5+ and As3+) and heavy metals (Cr6+ and Cr3+) adsorption, observing a direct relationship between samples processing and ionic species adsorption ability. Thus, it is shown that the control of the properties of SF based porous structures through processing, represents a suitable and ecofriendly approach for the development of bio-based materials for environmental applications.
