Stronger Spider Silks using Carbon-nanotubes/Graphene

Researchers from UK and italy discovered a spider silk three times stronger, and ten times tougher using nanotechnology boost with carbon nanotubes.
This bionic spider silk could be useful where lighter yet stronger materials are required, including parachutes or body armours, they said.
Research is led by Professor Nicola Pugno at the University of Trento in Italy, say the discovery could pave the way for a new class of bionicomposites, with a wide variety of uses.

"Humans have used silkworm silks widely for thousands of years, but recently research has focussed on spider silk, as it has extremely promising mechanical properties," Professor Pugno said."It is among the best spun polymer fibres in terms of tensile strength, ultimate strain, and especially toughness, even when compared to synthetic fibres such as Kevlar."
Professor Pugno said we already know that there are biominerals present in in the protein matrices and hard tissues of insects - which gives them high strength and hardness in their jaws, for examples.
So this study looked at whether spider silk's properties could be "enhanced" by artificially incorporating various different nanomaterials into the silk's biological protein structures.
"We found that the strongest silk the spiders spun had a fracture strength up to 5.4 gigapascals (GPa), and a toughness modulus up to 1,570 joules per gram (J/g)," Professor Pugno said. Normal spider silk, by comparison, has a fracture strength of around 1.5 GPa and a toughness modulus of around 150 J/g."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bio-Solar panel

Image
The scientists, at Imperial College London and University of Cambridge, have successfully Developed a new biophotovoltaic cell. "This Biophotovoltaic device is biodegradable and it can be serve as a disposable solar panel in the future and battery that can decompose in our composts or gardens,"  Co-author Marin Sawa at University of Arts London and Imperial College London told  Phys.org . "Cheap, accessible, environmentally friendly, biodegradable batteries without any heavy metals and plastics—this is what we and our environment really need but don't have just yet, and our work has shown that it is possible to have that." In general, biophotovoltaic  cells  contain some type of cyanobacteria or algae that is phototrophic, meaning it converts light into energy. However, even in the dark these organisms continue to generate some energy by metabolizing their internal storage reserves. So when the organisms are connected to a non-biological electrode, t...
Read more

Superstrong MicroBot

Image
Here is Introducing MicroTug Developed by biomimetics and dexterous Lab. This 12 gram of micro robot uses "controllable adhesive" surface plate which sticks to the surface only when shear pressure is applied. it is capable of pull the objects 2000 times its own weight. "This is equivalent of a human adult dragging a blue whale around on land" They said . Main goal of the project is to create a robot that can be useful to drag the heavy objects where human can't reach. Here is the video which shows simple working demonstration of Robot  pulling heavy weight. Courtesy
Read more

New Way to secure the Internet more reliably by Quantum physics

Image
scientists have developed a high-speed encryption system called "Quantum key distribution" (QKD) to stop hacker.  System is capable of distributing the encryption codes at the rate of MB/s which 10x faster than present method.  In a study of journal science advance  Here the researchers demonstrate that the technique is secure from common attacks, even in the face of equipment flaws that could open up links.
Read more