A comparative study on the dielectric and dynamic mechanical relaxation behavior of the regenerated silk fibroin films

In this paper, the relaxation behavior of the regenerated silk fibroin (SF) films was investigated using dielectric thermal analysis (DETA), and compared with the dynamic mechanical behavior obtained from dynamic mechanical thermal analysis (DMTA), in order to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of dielectric behavior of SF film and identify the differences between the two analyses. Compared to DMTA, DETA exhibited a higher sensitivity on the molecular relaxation behaviors at low temperature ranges that showed a high γ-relaxation peak intensity without noise. However, it was not effective to examine the relaxation behaviors at high temperatures such as α- and αc-relaxations that showed a shoulder peak shape. On the contrary, DMTA provided more information regarding the relaxation behaviors at high temperatures, by exhibiting the changes in width, intensity and temperature shift of the α-relaxation peak according to various crystallinities. Conclusively, DETA and DMTA can be utilized in a complementary manner to study the relaxation behavior of SF over a wide temperature range, due to the different sensitivity of each technique at different temperatures.