Processing Strategies to Obtain Highly Porous Silk Fibroin Structures with Tailored Microstructure and Molecular Characteristics and Their Applicability in Water Remediation.

A Reizabal, C M Costa, P G Saiz, B Gonzalez, L Pérez-Álvarez, R Fernández de Luis, A Garcia, J L Vilas-Vilela, S Lanceros-Méndez

Journal of hazardous materials 2021 Feb 05

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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. Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Citation

A Reizabal, C M Costa, P G Saiz, B Gonzalez, L Pérez-Álvarez, R Fernández de Luis, A Garcia, J L Vilas-Vilela, S Lanceros-Méndez. Processing Strategies to Obtain Highly Porous Silk Fibroin Structures with Tailored Microstructure and Molecular Characteristics and Their Applicability in Water Remediation. Journal of hazardous materials. 2021 Feb 05;403:123675