Natural silks beat plastics when it comes to generating fibres

The team, made up of scientists from Oxford University and Sheffield University, compared silk from the Chinese silkworm with molten high-density polyethylene (HDPE) — a material from which the strongest synthetic fibres are made.

A new technique developed by Dr Oleksandr Mykhaylyk from Sheffield University was used to study and compare how the two materials form fibres.

Mykhaylyk’s technique involves shining polarised light through a disk rotating over a plate to study the how fibres are formed as the two materials are spun.

Dr Chris Holland of the Oxford Silk Group, part of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, told The Engineer: ‘When you rotate the top disk, much like an LP player, the outer is going faster than the inside. Because the gap between the top and bottom disc is fixed, certain parts of the polymer melt are sheared faster than others.’

By looking at the speeds at which the polymers are sheared, he claimed that it is possible to determine how much energy has been used.