A promising new avenue in body armor technology research and development seeks to employ the one of nature's most resilient materials: spider silk. The past three decades have witnessed significant advances in body armor technology, with Dupont Kevlar® revolutionizing the industry in the early 1970s. The material is often described as being similar to a spider's web, with successive layers of tightly woven, twisted, and specially treated fibers slowing, deforming, and stopping bullets. Now researchers are looking to incorporate actual spider silk strands into bullet proof vests.
Today's personnel in the field facing ballistic threats have two basic body armor options, each with distinct limitations. Soldiers in war zones wear hard armor, which provides maximum protection against a range of ballistic threats up to high-powered rifle rounds. Unfortunately, this level of protection requires bulky and heavy gear, with hard armor plates typically placed in front of a soft armor vest. Police and security officers facing lower threat levels, typically from handguns, opt for lightweight armor that is flexible and minimizes blunt trauma injuries by dispersing the energy exerted by bullet impact. While Kevlar® is often described as being several times stronger than steel, it underperforms spider silk significantly in most measurable categories.
Utilizing spider silk instead of Kevlar® or similar materials in body armor would be revolutionary. Ten times stronger by weight than Kevlar®, spider silk is able to absorb three times as much energy as the synthetic fibers before breaking. Spider silk body armor would be super-lightweight and super-resilient, giving military personnel superior mobility and comfort to that currently experienced by civilian law enforcement officers wearing soft armor.
Spider Silk Research
A group of researchers at Germany's Heidelberg Institute For Theoretical Studies recently broke down the molecular-level components of what makes spider silk so incredibly strong. In particular, they focused on the two stages of spider silk fiber production. First, the silk is in a viscous and gooey firm when in the spider's abdomen. When it is expelled and spun, the silk takes on a strong and solid character. The team's findings suggest that the very same elements that give spider silk exceptional elasticity make it ideal for distributing the stress of impact, minimizing blunt trauma force.
The challenges to be overcome in creating a spider silk bullet proof vest are significant. There are currently two major strategies being pursued, the first involving solving the genome puzzle and creating synthetic spider silk. In 2007 a team of University of California bio-scientists notably announced that they had mapped the black widow spine and were injecting it into tomatoes. This has proved unsuccessful in generating results up to the present, as have other bioengineering attempts with goats, yeast, and bacteria.
The second strategy involves efficiently harvesting silk from spiders. Unfortunately, from a behavioral standpoint spiders are highly uncooperative, fighting each other when placed in close proximity. In addition, production quantity issues that have made harvesting unfeasible up to the present.
One interesting bioengineering approach that may wind up yielding significant resolves involves silkworms. While the silk they produce is not particularly strong, the animals do generate large quantities of the material, producing as much as a kilometer of strand in just a few days. They have also enjoy the benefit of having been cultivated by humans for centuries. A little over a decade ago, the Rajamangala Institute of Technology in Thailand developed body armor utilizing silk worm strands. A 16-layer vest stopped 9mm bullets, also affording a certain measure of protection against .22 caliber handguns and rifle rounds.
In early 2012, researchers at the University of Wyoming published findings indicating that they had genetically modified silk worms to produce a worm-spider silk combination that has strength properties similar to spider silk. Naturally, it will require years of further research and testing to produce a commercial grade worm-spider silk material, but the initial indications look positive. Hope you like my articles, My knowledge is in body armor and advances in weaponry. For more information about body armor including Bullet Proof Vests check out SafeGuardClothing.com
All I could find and maybe not affiliated with Safegaurd Armor.
What about products used everyday such as rope, wire, cable, etc. where these materials blended with a certain percentage of MS could increase strength, etc. What about tires, where the steel belts and other componets could be replaced or blended with MS to provide better wear, milegage, etc.
Hundreds of different uses if Monster silk can be price effective, won't know many of them until industries are approached and/or informed of the specs of MS.
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