A spider’s silk spigots
To illustrate the amazing properties of spider silk, Nikola Kojic offers an arresting example. Imagine a circular web with a diameter of 100 meters—about the length of a football field—spun from a silk thread about a centimeter thick. Concentric circles 4 cm apart attach to the web’s spokes, also 4 cm apart. This larger-than-life web “could stop a jumbo jet in midflight,” says Kojic.
[…] beyond the monster-movie possibilities, the scenario demonstrates what scientists covet most about spider silk: its exceptional capacity to absorb kinetic energy. Scientists would like to exploit that property in items ranging from bulletproof vests to suspension cables for bridges.
Spiders store tiny amounts of silk. Harvesting the material from the animals isn’t practical.
Natural spider silk is produced at room temperature with water as a solvent, says Chris Holland, a zoologist at the University of Oxford in England. “It’s made in the spider, and with the spider eating flies. That produces a fiber that we can’t even come close to.”
Silk’s mechanical properties primarily derive from two critical factors: the proteins that make up the material and the spinning process that transforms the liquid generated inside a spider into a solid fiber.
isn’t rayon artificial silk??
that was a really good article
#2, John, spider silk has twice the tensile strength of stainless steel, and 20 times that of nylon / rayon. But they feel nearly the same to the touch.
I would guess the quest for artificial silk has more to do with strength to weight ratio than ‘feel’.
Just my 2 cents (2 new gold dollars) worth.
Eeew.. Spider buttcheek image…
Wonder how spider silk aoulc stack up to buckytube fibers, which I’ve seen proposed for space elevator use.
Cool pix! Thanks.
#6, TJGeezer, Buckytubes have greater tensile strength than any other material. Their specific strength is 2 orders of magnitude greater than that of steel. If they do not break under stress, their deformation is perfectly elastic and reversible.
Thus, about 40x (!!) that of spider silk for near the same strength to weight ratio.
If you’re interested, new story about one of the hardest materials on Earth: http://tinyurl.com/2n8rc4