Wet‐Spinning Fabrication of Flexible Conductive Composite Fibers from Silver Nanowires and Fibroin

Abstract

Biocompatible flexible conductive composite fibers have attracted great research interest because of multitude of their potential applications, such as wearable devices, biomedical sensors, and actuators. Herein, highly conductive and flexible silver nanowire (AgNW)/fibroin composite fibers were fabricated by using a wet‐spinning technique. The composite fiber conductivity was as high as 5670 S/cm at an AgNW concentration of 29.1 wt%. The composite fibers also exhibited high flexibilities and could be folded without losing their conductivities. Furthermore, the composite fiber fabricated with a 3× draw ratio exhibited a breaking strain of 27.3% and breaking stress of 118.1 cN/dtex. Our attempt to produce such biocompatible flexible conductive composite fibers by using sustainable regenerated silk fibroins and compatible AgNWs via wet spinning may provide a practical way for fabricating functional biocompatible fiber materials.

Progress in Research and Application of Modified Silk Fibroin Fibers

“…The filling-modified SF fibers can be prepared by uniformly adding some metal or inorganic nanomaterials into SF to make them possess different functions, such as electrical conductivity, [7,18,30,31] photothermal property, [9,72,73] photoconductivity, [33,87] photochromism, [74] magnetic responsiveness, [75] and antimicrobial property. [76] For instance, adding some conductive fillers to SF solution to endow SF fibers with electrical conductivity is a common method.…”

“…Some scholars gained wet-spun Ag-NWs@SF composite fibers with the conductivity up to 5670 S cm −1 at the concentration of 29.1 wt.% of AgNWs, and its conductivity value was much larger than that with the same concentration of CNTs. [30] Other scholars prepared filling-modified SF fibers with photothermal and photochromic properties through wet spinning. MoS 2 @SF composite fibers with an excellent photothermal property could make its temperature raise from 20.0 to 81.0 °C within 1 min under the sunlight irradiation when the addition amount of MoS 2 was 2 wt.%, as shown in Figure 2b.…”

“…This review focuses on the design, preparation, and application of various modified SF fibers, and reviews the modification methods of SF fibers including filling, [7,18,30,31] blending, [10,[32][33][34] structural adjustment, [35][36][37] post-treatment, [26,38,39] crosslinking, [27,40] grafting [41][42][43] and in situ polymerization. [44][45][46] Besides, this review summarizes the properties of modified SF fibers and their application for filtration of heavy metal ions, [47][48][49] dyes in water [50,51] and air pollutants, [52,53] chemical sensors, [54][55][56] pressure/strain sensors, [16,57,58] triboelectric nanogenerators, [19,59,60] artificial skin, [21,61,62] wound dressings, [63][64][65][66][67]...…”

Recent applications of electrical, centrifugal, and pressurised emerging technologies for fibrous structure engineering in drug delivery, regenerative medicine and theranostics

“…WS is a simple, easy fiber engineering process and has been used to process an array of natural and synthetic polymeric material for a range of biomedical applications. It has been broadly used with natural polymers such as chitosan [86][87][88][89], collagen [75,90,91] and silk fibroin (SF) [71,92,93] which are particularly difficult to be processed with other fabrication techniques like melt spinning due to low thermal stability. One of the first reported uses of chitosan in WS was in 1993 by East and Qin [88].…”

Fabrication of robust silver plated conductive polyamide fibres based on tannic acid modification

“…The third type: ordinary ber and metal ber are mixed to form conductive fabric. 11 Among the conductive treatments for bres, electroless plating is the most effective, 12 high utilization, simple operation and relatively low cost. Silver is the most widely used metallic layer in electroplating materials, 13,14 which is dense and uniform, without obvious defects and high bonding strength.…”