1. Institute of Textiles and Clothing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong;2. PolyU Shenzhen Base, Yuexing No. 1 Road, High‐Tech Industrial Park, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518057, China
Abstract:
The molecular structural design learned from natural materials enables synthetic polymers with desirable and unique features to be fabricated. Inspired by spider silks, short‐chain polyalanine (PA) is introduced into multiblock biopolymers with poly(ε‐caprolactone) segments via a coupling reaction. As a result, PA segments in biopolymers form similar β‐sheet crystals to that of natural spidroins. These new biopolymers are found to exhibit nearly complete shape recovery and high shape fixity, along with significantly improved thermal stability due to the strong β‐sheet structures as netpoints. This work provides new insight for the design of novel shape‐memory polymers with potential use in biomedical applications.
