Comparison of the effects of post-spinning drawing and wet stretching on regenerated silk fibers produced through straining flow spinning

Straining Flow Spinning is a versatile and robust spinning technique for the production of regenerated silkworm silk fibers using mild chemistries. However, reaching high values of tensile strength and strain at breaking requires a step of wet-stretching in water, which limits scalability and the practical usage of the technique. Here, we show that adding a post-spinning drawing step to the procedure improves the performance of the fibers, and allows the development of a scalable process. It is also shown that the properties of the fiber can be tuned by varying the parameters of the post-spinning step. Finally, equivalence is established between the discrete wet-stretching process and the continuous post-spinning drawing step. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.