Researchers recreate web-slinging technology inspired by Spider-Man
Any kid who’s ever read a comic book or watched a Spider-Man movie imagines what it’s like to shoot webs from your wrist, fly above the city, and nail the villain. You’ve probably tried it. Researchers at Tufts University took these imaginary scenes seriously and developed the first web-slinging technology in which fluid material can be fired from a needle and quickly solidify as a thread that attaches to and lifts objects. did.
The research is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
Made at the Tufts University Silk Lab, these sticky fibers are made from silk moth cocoons, boiled in solution, and broken down into component proteins called fibroin. The silk fibroin solution is forced through a fine-bore needle to form a stream and, with appropriate additives, solidifies into fibers upon exposure to air.
Of course, the original inspiration for connecting silk fibers and unfolding them into nets and cocoons is nature. Spiders, ants, wasps, bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, and even flies can produce silk at some point in their life cycles.
Nature has also turned to Silk Labs to produce strong adhesives that can be used underwater, printable sensors that can be applied to almost any surface, edible coatings that can extend the shelf life of produce, and light-harvesting materials that can provide significant benefits. This led to the pioneering development of the use of silk fibroin. Improving solar cell efficiency and enabling more sustainable microchip manufacturing methods.
However, although researchers have made great progress with silk-based materials, they have not yet been able to replicate the spider’s mastery of controlling the stiffness, elasticity, and adhesive properties of the silk it spins.
The breakthrough came by pure chance. “I was working on a project using silk fibroin to make a very strong adhesive, and as I was cleaning glassware with acetone, I noticed that a cobweb-like substance had formed on the bottom of the glass. “We realized this,” said Marco Lo Presti, research assistant professor at the university. Tufts.
The serendipitous discovery overcomes several engineering challenges in replicating spider threads. Silk fibroin solutions slowly form a semi-solid hydrogel over several hours when exposed to organic solvents such as ethanol or acetone, but solidify almost immediately due to the presence of dopamine, which is used in the manufacture of adhesives. A process occurs.
Upon rapid mixing with an organic solvent cleaning solution, the silk solution rapidly produced fibers with high tensile strength and stickiness. Dopamine and its polymers utilize the same chemistry that barnacles use to form fibers that stick tenaciously to surfaces.
The next step was to spin the fibers in the air. The researchers added dopamine to the silk fibroin solution, which appears to draw water away from the silk and facilitate the transition from liquid to solid. When injected through a coaxial needle, a thin stream of silk solution is surrounded by a layer of acetone and begins to solidify.
Acetone evaporates in the air, leaving the fibers attached to objects they come in contact with. The researchers strengthened the silk fibroin dopamine solution by adding chitosan, a derivative of insect exoskeleton that gives the fibers up to 200 times more tensile strength, and borate buffer, which makes the fibers about 18 times more adhesive.
The diameter of the fibers can vary from the diameter of a human hair to about 0.5 millimeters, depending on the needle hole.
The device can fire a fiber that can pick up objects more than 80 times its own weight under various conditions. The researchers demonstrated this by picking up a cocoon, a steel bolt, an experimental tube floating in water, a female partially buried in sand, and a block of wood from a distance of about 12 centimeters.
Lo Presti said: “If you look at nature, you’ll see that spiders can’t release webs. Spiders typically spin silk from their glands, make physical contact with surfaces, and create lines. Build a nest by pulling. Our method is to shoot fibers from a device that attach to and pick up objects from a distance. This work is not expressed as a biologically inspired material. It’s actually superhero-inspired material.”
In this study, natural spider silk is still about 1,000 times stronger than man-made fibers. But with a little imagination and engineering, innovation can be improved even further, paving the way for a variety of technological applications.
“As scientists and engineers, we navigate the boundary between imagination and practice, and that’s where all the magic happens,” said Fiorenzo, the Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering at Tufts University and director of the Silk Club. Omenet said.
“We can take inspiration from nature. We can also take inspiration from comics and science fiction. In this case, we reverse engineered the silk material so that nature originally designed it and created it in the comics. We wanted it to work the way the writers imagined it.”
Further information: Marco Lo Presti et al, Dynamic Adhesive Fibers for Remote Capture of Objects, Advanced Functional Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202414219
Provided by Tufts University
Source: Inspired by Spider-Man, researchers recreate web-slinging technology (October 10, 2024) from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-spider-recreate-web-technology.html 2024 Retrieved October 10, 2017
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