Ultra-high-strength artificial silk is introduced

On November 13, the reporter learned from Tianjin University that Professor Lin Zhi's team from the School of Life Sciences of the university developed a new method for preparing super-strong artificial silk, converting cheap ordinary silk into artificial silk
with ultra-high strength.

Inspired by the artificial spinning of spider eggs, the team removed the sticky outer layer in ordinary silk through a special chemical bath, and combined with metal ion-assisted enhancement methods to obtain super silk fibers
that outperformed spider silk.
The tensile strength of this artificial silk fiber reaches 2.
0GPa, which is more than 70% higher than
the average strength of natural spider silk.
This achievement opens up a convenient and efficient way for the production of high-performance rayon, and provides a technical basis
for the large-scale production of silk textile materials with high performance.

According to reports, natural spider traction wire is the highest known strength of natural protein fiber in nature, and its strength is 5~10 times
that of the same quality steel.
However, it is very difficult to obtain large quantities of spider silk from natural spiders, and there are few actual products
related to spider silk on the market.
Human beings have a long history of using silk, but compared with spider silk, the strength and toughness of silk are far from enough, and the academic community has been committed to using silk as a starting point to make tougher silk thread, but most of the rayon threads obtained in the past are not good
.

"Silk fibroin is a natural polymer fibrin extracted from silk, and compared to proteins with severe degradation, a complete molecular chain of high relative molecular weight silk fibroin can improve the strength
of fibers.
" Lin Zhi introduced
.
He led the team to develop a method to use sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium carbonate to assist in dissolving the outer viscous layer of silk, so that the degumming rate of silkworm cocoon reached about 28%, and the relative molecular weight of the obtained regenerated silk fibroin was still large, which guaranteed its mechanical properties
to a certain extent.
During the artificial spinning process, the researchers squeezed the concentrated regenerated silk fibroin through microtubules like toothpaste
.
The extruded protein rapidly solidifies into slender fibers in a solution containing zinc and iron ions, and after appropriate post-treatment, the resulting fiber diameter is similar to that of spider traction wire, and its strength and hardness are significantly better than natural traction wire
.
The tensile strength of this artificial silk fiber is more than 70% higher than the average strength of natural spider silk, much higher than that of known natural microfilament
.