Tomorrow is Today

Hacking Spider Silk to Create Nano-Electronic Components:

As a protein-based polymer, spider silk is naturally insulating, so the researchers are exploring what happens when it’s coated with iodine, gold, or carbon nanotubes. In all three cases, the silk turned into a more conductive fiber. However, “gold really likes spider silk,” Steven told scientists at the American Physical Society’s March meeting in Boston. “Gold nanoparticles adhere to spider silk very well.”

The team started with 3.5-μm-wide silk harvested from Nephila clavipes, the golden orb-weaving spider. They placed the silk in a vacuum chamber and coated it with gold. The resulting fiber had electrical conductivity from the gold plus flexibility from the silk, and it measured only 1/25th the diameter of a human hair. That allowed the fibers to be used—even without conductive paste—as contacts on tiny organic crystals, which the lab chills to cryogenic temperatures to study their superconductivity.

Standard wires made of gold or other metals aren’t elastic enough and tend to lose contact with the soft organic crystals as temperatures change. The group found that the gold-coated silk fibers worked as contacts down to the lowest temperature they tested at, about 260 millikelvin.

The researchers also coated the silk with carbon nanotubes, creating highly sensitive strain sensors. Those could be used as heart-pulse monitors, Steven suggests.

Meanwhile, the iodine-doped silk showed changes in conductivity that depended on relative humidity. But the science didn’t stop there.

Steven heated the iodine-doped silk in an argon atmosphere to 800°C, creating a pyrolyzed, carbon-coated fiber that turned out to be a p-type semiconductor. The researchers then used those fibers to make filaments for incandescent bulbs.

Steven says the group is working on using the functionalized silk to make electronic components, such as diodes, inductors, and capacitors. It should be possible to build a field-effect transistor out of the semiconducting version of the material. (Other labs have already used silk from the silk moth, Bombyx mori, as the gate insulator in a transistor.)

Conducting and semiconducting fibers could be readily woven into fabrics to make so-called smart textiles, such as shirts that could sense temperature or other environmental changes. Combining the Florida State research with efforts under way elsewhere to create spider silk artificially might allow engineers to mass-produce fibers with tunable electrical properties, Steven says.

(via Spider Silk Weaves New Path for Electronics - IEEE Spectrum)

(Photo: Spider Silk Glands Source)