A technology that heralds new high-performance composites
(June 3, 2015) Professors
Frédérick Gosselin and Daniel Therriault, along with their master's student
Renaud Passieux, are not related to Spiderman. Nevertheless, these
Polytechnique Montréal 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.
Spider silk: a thread with stunning properties
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.