Spiders sprayed with water containing carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes have produced the toughest fibers ever measured, says an Italian research team. Prof. Nicola Pugno at the University of Trento in Italy and his team sprayed 15 Pholcidae spiders collected from the Italian countryside. The team checked the fibers the spiders produced, and found that they had incorporated the nanotubes.
Then the researchers tested the strength of the webs the bugs produced. “We measure a fracture strength up to 5.4 GPa, a Young’s modulus up to 47.8 GPa, and a toughness modulus up to 2.1 GPa,” says Prof. Pugno. “This is the highest toughness modulus for a fiber, surpassing synthetic polymeric high performance fibers such as Kevlar49, and even the current toughest knotted fibers.”
http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.06751
