Silkene: bionic silk with graphene or other nanomaterials spun by silkworms
The project aims at designing, developing, scaling-up and optimizing a pre-industrial process towards the mass production of “silkene”, a bionic silk fiber reinforced with graphene, or other nanomaterials such as nanotubes, directly spun by silkworms. The idea is simply based on nanomaterial ingestion and subsequent “silkene” spinning by silkworms. Silkene is expected to be significantly stronger and tougher that its natural counterpart. Since silk produced by silkworms has already impacted our society, the impact of SILKENE project could also be significant. The process under consideration should in this project be technically verified, optimized and taken to a pre-commercial stage, for applications in industrial sectors such as smart or high-performance technical fibers, textiles, and related reinforced composites. The concept has been already preliminarily (see http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.06751) demonstrated at the laboratory scale with spiders, within our ERC Starting Grant ""Bio-inspired Hierarchical Super Nanomaterials"" (BIHSNAM).