Wide Angle X-Ray Scattering to Study the Atomic Structure of Polymeric Fibers

Abstract

Natural fibrillar-like macromolecules find applications in several fields, thanks to their peculiar features, and are considered perfect building blocks for natural and artificial functional materials. Indeed, fibrous proteins (such as collagen or fibroin) are commonly used in scaffold fabrication for biomedical applications, due to the high biophysical similarity with the extracellular matrix (ECM) which stimulates tissue regeneration. In the textile industry, cellulose-based fabrics are widely used in place of cotton and viscose, which both have sustainability issues related to their fabrication. With this in mind, the structural characterization of the materials at molecular scale plays a fundamental role in gaining insight into the fiber assembly process. In this work, we report on three fibers of research interest (i.e., type I collagen, silk fibroin extracted from Bombyx mori, and cellulose) to show the power of wide-angle X-ray scattering to characterize both intra- and intermolecular parameters of fibrous polymers. The latest possibilities offered in the X-ray scattering field allow one to study fibers at solid state or dispersed in solutions as well as to perform quantitative scanning X-ray microscopy of tissues entirely or partially made by fibers.

Diffusion-Driven X-Ray Two-Dimensional Patterns Denoising

“…Despite of this, it can attain significant performance even in this case by reducing the noise level as witnessed by the measured values of the peak signal-to-noise ratio and of the structure similarity. In particular, we showed that an improvement in the values of the PSNR and of the SSIM can be obtained when considering also the source term (β = 0) in Equation (2). The parameter β is the only free parameter that has to be tuned to obtain the better performance of the method.…”

“…The study of the properties of crystalline materials mainly relies on the use of X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques, which give relevant information for several applications as, for example, in nanotechnology [1,2]. The processing of such data requires a chain of preliminary steps aiming at improving the quality of XRD data [3,4].…”

Oriented homo‐epitaxial crystallization of polylactic acid displaying a biomimetic structure and improved blood compatibility

“…The degree of widening of the diffraction peak attributable to a decline in the size of the grains is signified by β, while the Bragg angle is denoted by θ. 27,28 According to Table 2, the crystallization of PLA increased after orientation, but the crystal lattice size declined in conjunction with the draw ratio. T…”