Tag Archives: mechanically enhanced silk fibers

Feed your silkworms graphene or carbon nanotubes for stronger silk

This Oct. 11, 2016 news item on Nanowerk may make you wonder about a silkworm’s standard diet,

Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, have demonstrated that mechanically enhanced silk fibers could be naturally produced by feeding silkworms with diets containing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SW[C]NTs) or graphene.

The as-spun silk fibers containing nanofillers showed evidently increased fracture strength and elongation-at-break, demonstrating the validity of SWNT or graphene incorporation into silkworm silk as reinforcement through an in situ functionalization approach.

The researchers conclude that “by analyzing the silk fibers and the excrement of silkworms, … parts of the fed carbon nanomaterials were incorporated into the as-spun silk fibers, while others went into excrement.

Bob Yirka in an Oct. 11, 2016 article for phys.org provides a little information about silkworms and their eating habits,

In this new effort, the researchers sought to add new properties to silk by adding carbon nanotubes and graphene to their diet.

To add the materials, the researchers sprayed a water solution containing .2 percent carbon nanotubes or graphene onto mulberry leaves and then fed the leaves to the silkworms. They then allowed the silkworms to make their silk in the normal way. Testing of the silks that were produced showed they could withstand approximately 50 percent more stress than traditional silk. A closer look showed that the new silk was made of a more orderly crystal structure than normal silk. And taking their experiments one step further, the researchers cooked the new silk at 1,050 °C causing it to be carbonized—that caused the silk to conduct electricity.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Feeding Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes or Graphene to Silkworms for Reinforced Silk Fibers by Qi Wang, Chunya Wang, Mingchao Zhang, Muqiang Jian, and Yingying Zhang. Nano Lett., Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b03597 Publication Date (Web): September 13, 2016

Copyright © 2016 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.