Processing strategies to obtain highly porous silk fibroin structures with tailored microstructure and molecular characteristics and their applicability in water remediation

• Autor(a) principal: Reizabal, A.
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Costa, Carlos Miguel Silva, Saiz, P. G., Gonzalez, B., Pérez-Álvarez, L., Fernández de Luis, R., Garcia, A., Vilas-Vilela, J. L., Lanceros-Méndez, S.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/75499
• topic: Silk fibroin; Porous microstructure; Adsorption mechanism; Heavy metals removal; Water remediation; Ciências Naturais::Ciências Físicas; Science & Technology

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.