Mussel Byssus as a Green Fiber Manufacturing Platform

Biological materials and Nature’s manufacturing processes offer inspiration to move towards more green manufacturing of structural and functional materials. Functionality in Natures’ materials is strongly correlated with structure, such as chirality, orientation, and layering. In this Ph.D. thesis, I will focus on the mussel byssus, a thread fabricated by marine mussels from a pretransition liquid crystal organization within vesicles, which offers rich store principles and mechanisms to create green tough functional materials and composites used to remain attached to surfaces under continuous flowing states. The material organization of the mussel byssus precursor is a smectic liquid layered semisolid with oriented elements between layers.<br/><br/>This work is divided into three sequential stages: (i) thermodynamic-geometric modeling to ascertain the energy landscape and the stable, unstable, and metastable states of this material under changing thermodynamic driving forces, (ii) colloidal organization including the shape, size, and structural organization to attain for the vesicle-vesicle interactions during the transitional state, and (iii) fiber formation under flow conditions. In this work, I will focus on the progress so far in the area of thermodynamic-geometric model and will shed light on how geometric tools are powerful and useful to detect, control, and optimize equilibrium states of smectic liquid crystals, their organization, and thus, its application for the tunning of material properties.<br/><br/>In particular, we use level set lines of steepest decent, bifurcation methods, lines of curvature and geodesic to provide a multidimensional view of the evolution of stable, unstable states that appear when decreasing the phase transition parameter, here taken as temperature. Overall, it is found that the emergence of smectic order favors the increase of the orientational alignment, yielding in the enhancement of the elasticity modulus of the solid state. Understanding the evolution and behavior of the hierarchical organization will provide a pathway for the development of green engineering principles, storage technologies, biocompatible materials such as tissue scaffolds, and advances in the processing of such materials involving scalable biomedical and technical applications like extrusion molding, and injection molding to address crucial public health and environmental concerns.