Abstract

FERNANDEZ-D'ARLAS, Borja; GONZALEZ, Iker  and  ECEIZA, Arantxa. Towards spider silk mimicry using polyurethanes with short segments of rigid and semiflexible units. Rev. LatinAm. Metal. Mater. [online]. 2015, vol.35, n.1, pp.39-48. ISSN 0255-6952.

The capacity to absorb mechanical energy is determined through the concept of toughness. Materials with high toughness such as spider silk, could be used in numerous fields like civil engineering, biomedicine, vial-security or defense. Elastomeric polyurethanes are attractive to try to mimic spider silk through a synthetic pathway due to the materials similitudes in terms of properties and morphology. This work presents results on the synthesis and characterization of a new family of segmented polyurethanes formed by short units of semiflexible and stiff or crystalline segments. The use of semiflexible short units is the principal innovation of this work, since usually the semiflexible segments are composed of diols of molecular weights in the range 2000-4000 g mol^-1. The introduction of short length semiflexible segments aims to endow the material a higher capacity of interchain hydrogen bonding at the same time it retains the elastomeric behavior. The materials were characterized by Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), atomic force microscopy (AFM), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and tensile testing.

Keywords : Polyurethanes; silk; mechanical properties.

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