Web-slinging technology inspired by the Spider-Man comic character has been developed by silk researchers.
The Tufts University team created a process in which a fluid material can shoot from a needle, immediately solidify as a sticky string that can lift objects.
The sticky fibres are made from silk moth cocoons that are boiled and broken down into their building block proteins called fibroin.
Researcher Marco Lo Presti said the web product was created by accident.
“I was working on a project making extremely strong adhesives using silk fibroin, and while I was cleaning my glassware with acetone, I noticed a web-like material forming on the bottom of the glass,” he said.
“If you look at nature, you will find that spiders cannot shoot their web.
“They usually spin the silk out of their gland, physically contact a surface, and draw out the lines to construct their webs. We are demonstrating a way to shoot a fibre from a device, then adhere to and pick up an object from a distance.”
The Tufts University Silklab is pioneering the use of silk fibroin to make:
- Powerful glues that can work underwater
- Printable sensors that can be applied to virtually any surface
- Edible coatings that can extend the shelf life of produce
- A light collecting material that could significantly enhance the efficiency of solar cells
- More sustainable microchip manufacturing methods
The research report said, despite the progress with silk-based materials, the team was yet to replicate the “mastery of spiders” which could control the stiffness, elasticity, and adhesive properties of the threads they spun.
The new web-slinging process can produce fibres that are sized between half the thickness of a human hair and half a millimetre.
The device can shoot fibre capable of picking up objects over 80 times their own weight under various conditions.
Natural spider silk is still about 1000 times stronger than the man-made fibres in the study.
“We can be inspired by nature,” Silklab Director Fiorenzo Omenetto said. “We can (also) be inspired by comics and science fiction. In this case, we wanted to reverse engineer our silk material to behave the way nature originally designed it, and comic book writers imagined it.”
The research is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials
