Abstract
Silk fibroin (SF) and sodium alginate (SA) are natural polymers used to produce biomaterials. One of the strategies to improve the properties of these products is to prepare blends with them, which are partially miscible. Phase separation is observed, therefore, the thermodynamic analysis of this system is important to predict the final state and composition of this blends. This study explored blends with a different initial composition of SF, SA, and water (WA) at 25°C and neutral pH. After phase separation, two phases were identified, one rich in SF and other rich in SA. The Flory-Huggins parameters of interaction of polymer-solvent and polymer-polymer were estimated using the extended equation and data of phase equilibrium, their values indicates the partial miscibility of the polymers.
Highlights
Blends of Silk fibroin (SF) and sodium alginate (SA) have been studied since the beginning of the 90’s years (Liang and Hirabayashi, 1992)
We focused on understanding the mechanism of phase separation of SF-SA system and the physical-chemical characteristics of those blends (Lopes et al, 2018)
The proportion of each phase changes over the days, the solid-like phase becomes denser, indicating that even if phase separation started after 1 day, the system was not in thermodynamic equilibrium
Summary
Blends of Silk fibroin (SF) and sodium alginate (SA) have been studied since the beginning of the 90’s years (Liang and Hirabayashi, 1992). Most of the works with these two polymers explore the potential of the blends as a biomaterial due to their characteristics such as biocompatibility, biodegradability and low toxicity (de Moraes and Beppu, 2013; de Moraes et al, 2014; Ming and Zuo, 2014; Zhang et al, 2015; Wang et al, 2016). Silk fibroin is a protein produced by arthropods like spiders, mites, bees and silkworms, the last one is more used due to the facility of domestication (Kundu et al, 2013), the main producer worldwide is Bombyx mori silkworm (Koh et al, 2015). SF has been explored to develop new materials such as porous materials, scaffolds, wound dressings, hydrogels, nano-particles and as a substrate in optics and sensors (Kim et al, 2005; Nogueira et al, 2011; Wenk et al, 2011; Calamak et al, 2014; Li et al, 2017; Wang et al, 2020)
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