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Published on: April 26, 2019
Enhanced water-responsive actuation of porous Bombyx mori silk
Yeojin Jung1,2, Maheen K Khan1,2, Darjan Podbevšek2
1Department of Chemical Engineering, The City College of New York, 160 Convent Avenue, New York, NY, 10031, USA. xchen@gc.cuny.edu.
Abstract:
Bombyx mori silk with a nanoscale porous architecture significantly deforms in response to changes in relative humidity. Despite the increasing amount of water adsorption and water-responsive strain with increasing porosity of the silk, there is a range of porosities that result in silk's optimal water-responsive energy density at 3.1 MJ m-3. Our findings show the possibility of controlling water-responsive materials' swelling pressure by controlling their nanoporosities.

