The Use Case: Dragline spider silk is known for its unique combination of strength and toughness. But this combination has been hard to replicate in synthetic fibers. To push the limits, scientists are trying to find a way to produce synthetic materials with a strength and toughness comparable to that of spider silk by designing an innovative microstructure of synthetic fibers. For this purpose, microscopic characterization using SEM and XRM helps to understand the link of microstructure, process and property.
The Challenge: To create similar strong and tough fibers from polymers, it is essential to reach the nearly perfect uniaxial orientation of the fibrils by heat stretching, annealing under tension in the presence of linking molecules.
The Solution: Both a ZEISS FE-SEM and a X-ray microscope, ZEISS Xradia Ultra, were successfully applied to characterize the morphology and to understand the effects of the annealing and stretching process in order to optimize the overall properties of polymer fibers.