Engineering Commons^™

Spider Silk As A Novel High Performance Biomimetic Muscle Driven By Humidity, Ingi Agnarsson, Ali Dhinojwala, Vasav Sahni, Todd Blackledge

Ali Dhinojwala

The abrupt halt of a bumble bee's flight when it impacts the almost invisible threads of an orb web provides an elegant example of the amazing strength and toughness of spider silk. Spiders depend upon these properties for survival, yet the impressive performance of silk is not limited solely to tensile mechanics. Here, we show that silk also exhibits powerful cyclic contractions, allowing it to act as a high performance mimic of biological muscles. These contractions are actuated by changes in humidity alone and repeatedly generate work 50 times greater than the equivalent mass of human muscle. Although we demonstrate …