Animal Silk-Derived Amorphous Carbon Fibers for Electricity Generation and Solar Steam Evaporation.

Ping Qi,Jing Ren,Shengjie Ling

doi:10.3389/fchem.2021.669797

Abstract

Animal silk-derived carbon materials are of interest to various applications, such as smart cloth and wearable sensors. However, it remains a challenge to massively transform silks into continuous carbon fibers. In this work, carbon fibers based on two kinds of animal silks, i.e., Bombyx mori (B. mori) silk and Antheraea pernyi (A. pernyi) silk, are prepared by using a large-scale-capable one-step heating process without any additives or activation process. These carbon fibers and yarns are electroconductive and mechanically robust. To expand the application of these carbonized silks, we further weaved them with cotton yarns to obtain composite fabrics with different textures and evaluated their performance for solar steam evaporation. Our results confirmed that the advantages of these composite fabrics in light absorption, large surface area, and hierarchical liquid transport channels allowed them to be used as a solar steam generation for desalination and sewage treatment. In addition, we reported that these conductive carbon fibers could be assembled into fluidic nanogenerators to generate electricity from the water flow. This work is expected to guide a large-scale preparation and use of animal silk-derived amorphous carbon fibers.

Highlights

Carbon fibers can be produced from animal silks through a high-temperature carbonization as the fiber morphology of silks can be maintained after the carbonization (Khan et al, 2007; Cho et al, 2015, 2017)
We explored the applications of these carbonized silk fabrics in fluidic fiber generators and solar steam generations
The carbonization of B. mori silks can be conducted at different temperatures more than 800◦C

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Carbon fibers can be produced from animal silks through a high-temperature carbonization as the fiber morphology of silks can be maintained after the carbonization (Khan et al, 2007; Cho et al, 2015, 2017). Apart from the advantages of sustainability, the advantages of nature-sourced carbon fibers in the mechanical and electric properties have been noticed (Wang et al, 2017, 2019; Xu N. et al, 2017) Most of these carbon fibers have a decent mechanical strength for mechanized processing, such as knitting and weaving while maintaining flexibility for arbitrary deformation. The resulted carbonized silks maintained their original morphology while they were mechanically robust and electrically conductive These merits allow these carbonized silks to be co-weaved with other yarns, such as cotton yarns, into functional fabrics. An electrochemical workstation monitored the output voltage generated by a fluidic fiber nanogenerator with a solvent motion velocity of 0.78 cm/s

Evaluation

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

CONCLUSIONS