Spider silk is the toughest fibre found in nature. When stretched or pulled, it can absorb more energy than steel or nylon without rupturing, and can be used to make bulletproof vests.
Why is spider silk better than traditional silk…or even Kevlar and steel? Not only is spider silk stronger than Kevlar and steel, spider silk is extremely flexible, making it more comfortable and providing higher mobility and movement for the wearer.
Waste not want not! Incredibly spider silk is one of the toughest natural materials on the planet, tougher than Kevlar, the material generally used in bulletproof vests. Being tougher means that spider silk can stretch a lot more than Kevlar before it breaks.
Spider silk is extremely ductile, meaning it's incredibly stretchy. That stretchiness, combined with the amount of force needed to break it when it won't stretch anymore, means it can absorb three times as much energy as Kevlar before breaking.
Quantitatively, spider silk is five times stronger than steel of the same diameter. It has been suggested that a Boeing 747 could be stopped in flight by a single pencil-width strand and spider silk is almost as strong as Kevlar, the toughest man-made polymer.
Would it surprise you to learn that, for its weight, spider web silk is stronger and tougher than steel? A web made of strands of silk as thick as a pencil could stop a Boeing 747 in flight. Scientists are trying to replicate its properties for use in bulletproof vests. It has other beneficial properties as well.
Spider silk is five times stronger than steel—now, scientists know why | Science | AAAS.
Kevlar. Perhaps one of the better-known bulletproof materials, Kevlar is a synthetic fiber that's heat resistant and incredibly strong. It's also lightweight, making it a popular choice for wearable bulletproof items. Kevlar is used in both military and civilian applications.
In terms of overall durability, both UHMWPE and Kevlar rank high above other industrial fibers. However, UHMWPE fibers like Spectra and Dyneema exhibit resistance five times higher than Kevlar—even using just half the number of synthetic materials.
But unlike silkworms, harvesting silk directly from spiders is not a commercially viable option. Spiders require vast amounts of space for their webs, individual spiders do not produce high quantities of silk, and spiders tend to eat each other.
Spiders avoid people, animals, and most insects – except for the one's they're about to eat of course. As stated above, most spiders are relatively small. That makes them especially vulnerable. Many birds and animals may try to eat spiders, or at the very least, they'll probably interfere with the spider's food source.
Web Spider's weakness is X's Twin Slasher, which severs his string and makes him fall on the floor.
There is no question the silk would stop a bullet, but due to the stretch of the fibres it will likely be on the wrong side of your chest,” Lewis says. “The true uniqueness of spider dragline silk is its combination of strength and stretch which is unmatched by any other fibre,” he adds.
Spider silk is the toughest fibre found in nature. When stretched or pulled, it can absorb more energy than steel or nylon without rupturing, and can be used to make bulletproof vests.
DuPont's Kevlar fiber, the soft armor fiber widely adopted by law enforcement, is often described as five times stronger than steel -- but spider silk continues to outperform its artificial counterparts, so the pursuit of Spider-Man style armor has been underway for decades.
In fact, in terms of tensile strength, which is the maximum amount of stress a material can endure before breaking, spider silk is five times tougher than steel. If it was converted to human size, it would be strong enough to stop a jetliner in its flightpath.
The largest spider web ever found was a massive 82 foot wide web spanning a river in Madagascar. Discovered deep in the heart of the Andaside-Mantadia National Park, this humongous web was created by a little known spider – the Darwin's bark spider.
I tested several samples of spider silk threads that were close in diameter to human hair. I also tested human hair. Both tests included lifting a weight. Spider silk with the same diameter as human hair is stronger than human hair, likely twice as strong.
Break bulletproof glass with explosives like dynamite or C4.
Most varieties of detonating materials will almost certainly break through many layers of bulletproof glass. Set these explosives within about 3 feet (0.91 m) of the glass to maximize their effectiveness.
Their studies found that the energy to puncture layers of graphene is 8-12 times greater than that needed for a comparable mass of steel. The only other material that comes close to graphene in “bullet resistance” is kevlar, which consists of long-chain carbon molecules locked into rigid, layered sheets.
In the real world nothing is absolutely bulletproof. The Kevlar made bulletproof vests are actually bullet resistant and graded to a specific level of protection according to the international standards for ballistic resistance, one of the most used is NIJ 0101.04.
Keep in mind spiders don't really “lift” objects either, so we'll just use physical strength. According to the research I found, it can be anywhere from 2-8 times their own body weight–which is a lot less than our arachnid-enhanced hero can.
Thanks for the question, George – the simple answer is that spider silk breaks easily because it's really, really, really thin. A thread in the web of a garden spider is just 0.003 millimetres across – that's more than 20 times thinner than a hair from your head.
It's a finite resource. They can't just go on spinning it and spinning it forever, they have to metabolise food in order to restock their supply.