Abstract
Spiders, silks, and webs are marvels of nature that have inspired high-performance material design, resilient structural design, and innovative manufacturing in the materials science and engineering fields. In this article, we review the roles and mechanisms of self-assembly and spinning processes for making hierarchical structures of synthetic and natural fibers with multifunctionality. We discuss the ability of spider webs to maintain their functionality under construction while withstanding predator, human, and environmental threats, which comes from their self-assembled structures from nanoscales to macroscales. We conclude by exploring the future of novel mobile, autonomous, time- and cost-effective spider-inspired three-dimensional printing technology for making resilient biomaterials, structures, and synthetic silk materials.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 59-67 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering |
Volume | 15 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 2020 |
Funding
This work was supported by ONR ( N000IK14-19-1-2375 ), US Air Force Office of Scientific Research ( FA9550-15-1-0514 ), and NIH ( U01 EB014976 ), ARO ( W911NF1920098 ), as well as MIT CAST through a grant from The Mellon Foundation . We further acknowledge support from the MIT UROP office .
Keywords
- 3D printing
- Self-assembling materials
- Sonification
- Spider silk
- Spider webs