Self-assembly of recombinant spider silk protein at air-liquid interfaces is used as a starting point to produce homogeneous fiber bundles. The film that is formed on a silk protein solution in a vertically placed syringe is subjected to repeated controlled extension and compression by an oscillating vertical motion. Thereby, a precise breakup of the film can be achieved, followed by transport and roll-up against the syringe wall prior to extraction. Advantages of the method are that it 1) is simple to use; 2) requires a small volume of protein solution (1 mL) at relatively low concentration (1 mg mL^-1 ); 3) can be performed under sterile conditions; 4) does not require any use of coagulants; and 5) is compatible with the addition of viable cells during the process, which thereby are integrated uniformly throughout the fiber.

The present study experimentally determines the transitional Reynolds number range for plane channel flow and characterizes its transitional state. The pressure along the channel is measured to determine the skin friction coefficient as function of Reynolds number from the laminar state, through the transitional region into the fully turbulent state. The flow structure was studied through flow visualisation which shows that as the Reynolds number increases from the laminar state the transitional region starts showing randomly occurring turbulent spots. With increasing Reynolds number the spots shift into oblique patches and bands of small scale turbulence that form across the channel width, together with large-scale streaky structures found in areas between the turbulent regions. An image analysing technique was used to determine the intermittency factor, i.e. the turbulence fraction in the flow, as function of Reynolds number. It is found that the skin friction coefficient reaches its turbulent value before the flow is fully turbulent (the intermittency factor is still below one). This suggests that the observed streaky structures in non-turbulent regions contribute to the enhancement of the wall-normal transfer of momentum. Also above the Reynolds numbers where the turbulent skin friction coefficient has been established large-scale features consisting of irregular streaky structures are found. They have an oblique shape similar to the non-turbulent and turbulent patches in the transitional flow indicating that the transition process is not fully complete even above the Reynolds number where the skin friction reaches its turbulent level.

Biologically compatible membranes are of high interest for several biological and medical applications. Tissue engineering, for example, would greatly benefit from ultrathin, yet easy‐to‐handle, biodegradable membranes that are permeable to proteins and support cell growth. In this work, nanomembranes are formed by self‐assembly of a recombinant spider silk protein into a nanofibrillar network at the interface of a standing aqueous solution. The membranes are cm‐sized, free‐standing, bioactive and as thin as 250 nm. Despite their nanoscale thickness, the membranes feature an ultimate engineering strain of over 220% and a toughness of 5.2 MPa. Moreover, they are permeable to human blood plasma proteins and promote cell adherence and proliferation. Human keratinocytes seeded on either side of the membrane form a confluent monolayer within three days. The significance of these results lays in the unique combination of nanoscale thickness, elasticity, toughness, biodegradability, protein permeability and support for cell growth, as this may enable new applications in tissue engineering including bi‐layered in vitro tissue models and support for clinical transplantation of coherent cell layers.

The mechanism of silk assembly, and thus the cues for the extraordinary properties of silk, can be explored by studying the simplest protein parts needed for the formation of silk-like materials. The recombinant spider silk protein 4RepCT, consisting of four repeats of polyalanine and glycine-rich segments (4Rep) and a globular C-terminal domain (CT), has previously been shown to assemble into silk-like fibers at the liquid-air interface. Herein, we study the interfacial behavior of the two parts of 4RepCT, revealing new details on how each protein part is crucial for the silk assembly. Interfacial rheology and quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation show that 4Rep interacts readily at the interfaces. However, organized nanofibrillar structures are formed only when 4Rep is fused to CT. A strong interplay between the parts to direct the assembly is demonstrated. The presence of either a liquid-air or a liquid-solid interface had a surprisingly similar influence on the assembly.

The imbibition of a liquid into a thin deformable porous substrate driven by capillary suction is considered. The substrate is initially dry and has uniform porosity and thickness. Two-phase flow theory is used to describe how the liquid flows through the pore space behind the wetting front when out-of-plane deformation of the solid matrix is considered. Neglecting gravity and evaporation, standard shallow-layer scalings are used to construct a reduced model of the dynamics. The model predicts convergence to a self-similar behavior in all regions except near the wetting front, where a boundary layer arises whose structure narrows with the advance of the front. Over time, the rise height approaches the similarity scaling of t1/2, as in the classical Washburn or BCLW law. The results are compared with a series of laboratory experiments using cellulose paper sheets, which provide qualitative agreement.

Cellulose nanofibrils can be obtained from trees and have considerable potential as a building block for biobased materials. In order to achieve good properties of these materials, the nanostructure must be controlled. Here we present a process combining hydrodynamic alignment with a dispersion-gel transition that produces homogeneous and smooth filaments from a low-concentration dispersion of cellulose nanofibrils in water. The preferential fibril orientation along the filament direction can be controlled by the process parameters. The specific ultimate strength is considerably higher than previously reported filaments made of cellulose nanofibrils. The strength is even in line with the strongest cellulose pulp fibres extracted from wood with the same degree of fibril alignment. Successful nanoscale alignment before gelation demands a proper separation of the timescales involved. Somewhat surprisingly, the device must not be too small if this is to be achieved.

Flow of a suspension of water and nano-fibrillated cellulose (NFC) in a curved and rotating channel is studied experimentally and theoretically. The aim is to investigate how NFC affects the stability of the flow. This flow is subject to a centrifugal instability creating counter-rotating vortices in the flow direction. These rolls can be both stabilised and destabilised by system rotation, depending on direction and velocity of the rotation. Flow visualisation images with pure water and an NFC/water suspension are categorised, and stability maps are constructed. A linear stability analysis is performed, and the effect of fibrils is taken into account assuming straight fibrils and constant orientation distributions, i.e., without time-dependent flow-orientation coupling. The results show that NFC has a less stabilising effect on the primary flow instability than indicated from the increase in viscosity measured by a rotary viscometer, but more than predicted from the linear stability analysis. Several unknown parameters (the most prominent being fibril aspect ratio and the interaction parameter in the rotary diffusion) appear in the analysis.

Fibre streaks are observed in experiments with fibre suspensions in a turbulent half-channel flow. The preferential concentration methods, most commonly used to quantify preferential particle concentration, are in one dimension found to be concentration dependent. Two different new streak quantification methods are evaluated, one based on Voronoi analysis and the other based on artificial particles with an assigned fixed width. The width of the particle streaks and a measure of the intensity of the streaks, i.e. streakiness, are sought. Both methods are based on the auto-correlation of a signal, generated by summing images in the direction of the streaks. Common for both methods is a severe concentration dependency, verified in experiments keeping the flow conditions constant while the (very dilute) concentration of fibres is altered. The fixed width method is shown to be the most suitable method, being more robust and less computationally expensive. By assuming the concentration dependence to be related to random noise, an expression is derived, which is shown to make the streak width and the streakiness independent of the concentration even at as low concentrations as 0.05 particles per pixel column in an image. The streakiness is obtained by applying an artificial particle width equal to 20 % of the streak width. This artificial particle width is in this study found to be large enough to smoothen the correlation without altering the streakiness nor the streak width. It is concluded that in order to make quantitative comparisons between different experiments or simulations, the evaluation has to be performed with care and be very well documented.