Professors Frederick Gosselin and Daniel Therriault, along with their master's student Renaud Passieux, are not related to Spiderman. Nevertheless, these Polytechnique Montreal researchers have produced an ultra-tough polymer fibre directly inspired by spider silk! They recently published an article about the project in the journal Advanced Materials.
Three to eight microns in diameter but five to ten times tougher than steel or Kevlar: despite its lightness, spider silk has such remarkable elongation and stretch-resistance properties that humans have long sought to replicate it, in order to make products with those same characteristics.
In large part, spider silk owes its exceptional strength -- meaning its ability to absorb a large amount of energy before failing -- to the particular molecular structure of the protein chain of which it's composed. The mechanical origin of its strength drew the interest of researchers at the Laboratory for Multiscale Mechanics in Polytechnique Montreal's Department of Mechanical Engineering.
"The silk protein coils upon itself like a spring. Each loop of the spring is attached to its neighbours with sacrificial bonds, chemical connections that break before the main molecular structural chain tears," explained Professor Gosselin, who, along with his colleague Daniel Therriault, is co-supervising Renaud Passieux's master's research work. He added: "To break the protein by stretching it, you need to uncoil the spring and break each of the sacrificial bonds one by one, which takes a lot of energy. This is the mechanism we're seeking to reproduce in laboratory,"
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