Inspired Artificial Spider Silk with Adaptive Molecular Architecture for Fire-safety and Mechanical Enhancement

Objective

"The global synthetic fiber industry has numerous development opportunities (reach €6.5 billion sales by 2030) in high-performance material fields such as aerospace and fire-safety textiles. However, fabricating specialty fibers exhibiting high strength combined with high toughness remains challenging due to their inherent conflicts. Moreover, synthetic fiber, extracted from non-renewable fossil fuels, still has constraints in the modifiability of its polymer chain, light sensitivity, and limited degradability. Therefore, facing above challenges, the development and understanding of new systems for scalable spinning of strong & tough natural fiber coupled with enhanced flame-retardant properties is vitally important yet urgently to be addressed. The SAFE-silk project aims to construct adaptive molecular networks in silk fibroin solution for artifical wet spinning of fibers with synergistic mechanical and fire-safety enhancement. By mimicing natural conformation transition of fibroin molecules to fibril, the in-situ carboxylation of fibroin solution followed by transition metal ions addition will introduce Fe-amino acid, and Fe-phytic acid coordination complexes as intermolecular connecting nodes. Meanwhile, these complexes will endow artifical spider silk fibers with enhanced fire-safety, due to the condensed flame retardancy mechanism. Molecular dynamics and rheology studies on fibroin solution will be investigated to precisely predict fibroin nucleation and conformation transition behavior for subsequent micro-fluid inspired aqueous wet spinning and post-drawing process. This imparts desirable scability and further enhances sustainability. SAFE-silk project is a typical multidisciplinary and requires complementary expertise from the host (Polymer Chemistry, Fire Retardant Materials) and the researcher (Molecular chemistry, Fiber science), contributing to achieving ""Sustainable Development Goals"" and ""Textiles of the Future"" of EU policies/Horizon program."