Spider Silk Driven Artificial Muscle, and Soft Robots?

Spider silk is known for its strength, weight for weight, silk is stronger than steel. However, a new property of the spider silk recently observed by researchers at MIT may be the very beginning for a new approach to robotics.

Researchers at MIT have discovered a property of spider silk called “Supercontraction”. When exposed to higher levels of humidity, the spider silk fibers automatically shrink and twist at the same time, providing a strong torsional force.

This “torsional force” has implications for designing artificial muscles based on the spider silk’s reaction to humidity.

 

According to Phys, spider silk is made of two main proteins, called MaSp1 and MaSp2. The protein building block called “proline”, suspected to be the source of the twisting reaction, is found within MaSp2.

When water molecules interact with the proline they disrupt its hydrogen bonds in an asymmetrical way that causes the rotation. The rotation only goes in one direction, and it takes place at least at 70 percent relative humidity.

The harnessing of this molecular kinetic energy can lead to breakthroughs in designs of “Soft Robots”, and “Artificial Muscles”.

 

The discovery of the supercontraction and rotation of the spider silk has been attributed to chance by researchers responsible:

“We found this by accident initially… My colleagues and I wanted to study the influence of humidity on spider dragline silk… When we increased the humidity, the pendulum started to rotate. It was out of our expectation. It really shocked me.”

Experimentation, and R&D are becoming more and more crucial to global competitiveness in the economy and geopolitics. Technological advances and innovations, and the intellectual property rights to profit from them has become national security issues for the US and China.

While MIT experimented with spider web and spun up possibilities for innovation, Thailand is tinkering with the web as well, but the latter’s hopes for getting any thing innovative from the authoritarian Cybersecurity law is not reassuring.