Spider silk as a novel high performance biomimetic muscle driven by humidity
Spider silk as a novel high performance biomimetic muscle driven by humidity
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DOI：
10.1242/jeb.028282
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发表时间：
2009-07-01
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
Blackledge, Todd A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Agnarsson, Ingi;Dhinojwala, Ali;Blackledge, Todd A.
当一只大黄蜂撞击到一张几乎看不见的圆网上的丝线时，它的飞行突然停止，这为蜘蛛丝惊人的强度和韧性提供了一个优雅的例子。蜘蛛依靠这些特性生存，然而丝令人印象深刻的性能不仅限于拉伸力学。在这里，我们表明，丝也表现出强大的周期性收缩，使其能够作为生物肌肉的高性能模仿。这些收缩仅由湿度的变化驱动，并重复产生比人体肌肉等效质量大50倍的功。虽然我们证明了这种反应是普遍的，并且在不同的亲水性材料中发生较弱，但蜘蛛丝的高模量使其产生特殊的力。此外，由于这种效应已经在直径仅为5 μ m的单根丝纤维的水平上起作用，因此它可以很容易地在生物肌肉起作用的整个尺寸范围内进行缩放。相比之下，迄今为止开发的最成功的合成肌肉是由电压驱动的，因此它们不能在横截面积的大范围内轻松缩放。蚕丝肌的潜在适用性进一步增强了我们的发现，蚕纤维也表现出周期性收缩，因为它们已经在商业数量。使用湿或干空气驱动仿生蚕丝肌肉纤维的简单性以及蚕丝产生的令人难以置信的能量为设计用于机器人和微型机器的轻质紧凑致动器、新传感器和绿色能源生产提供了独特的可能性。
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 that this response is general and occurs weakly in diverse hydrophilic materials, the high modulus of spider silk is such that it generates exceptional force. Furthermore, because this effect already operates at the level of single silk fibers, only 5 mu m in diameter, it can easily be scaled across the entire size range at which biological muscles operate. By contrast, the most successful synthetic muscles developed so far are driven by electric voltage, such that they cannot scale easily across large ranges in cross-sectional areas. The potential applicability of silk muscles is further enhanced by our finding that silkworm fibers also exhibit cyclic contraction because they are already available in commercial quantities. The simplicity of using wet or dry air to drive the biomimetic silk muscle fibers and the incredible power generated by silk offer unique possibilities in designing lightweight and compact actuators for robots and micro-machines, new sensors, and green energy production.