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A great flourish of interest in the development of new high-strength and high-toughness materials is taking place in contemporary materials science, with the aim of surpassing the mechanical properties of commercial high-performance fibres.…
Spider silk is biocompatible, biodegradable, and rivals some of the best synthetic materials in terms of strength and toughness. Despite extensive research, comprehensive experimental evidence of the formation and morphology of its internal…
Living systems are built of multiscale-composites: materials formed of components with different properties that are assembled in complex micro- and nano-structures. Such biological multiscale-composites often show outstanding physical…
The spider silk is one of the most interesting bio-materials investigated in the last years. One of the main reasons that brought scientists to study this organized system is its high level of resistance if compared to other artificial…
The pyriform silk of the attachment disc of a spider was studied using infrared-visible vibrational sum frequency generation (SFG) spectroscopy. The spider can attach dragline and radial lines to many kinds of substrates in nature…
An essential element in the web-trap architecture, the capture silk spun by ecribellate orb spiders consists of glue droplets sitting astride a silk filament. Mechanically this thread presents a mixed solid-liquid behavior unknown to date.…
Spider silks are remarkable materials characterized by superb mechanical properties such as strength, extensibility and lightweightedness. Yet, to date, limited models are available to fully explore sequence-property relationships for…
Graphene extraordinary strength, stiffness and lightness have generated great expectations towards its application in flexible electronics and as mechanical reinforcement agent. However, the presence of lattice defects, unavoidable in…
In this paper, we investigate, by molecular dynamics simulations, the mechanical properties of a new carbon nanostructure, termed graphene nanochain, constructed by sewing up pristine or twisted graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) and interlocking…
An asymmetric \b{eta}-sheet structure of spider silk is said to induce optical second harmonic generation. In this paper, using an in-house non-scanning type femtosecond pulse laser second harmonic generation microscope, we characterized…
The remarkable mechanical properties of spider silk, including its tensile strength and extensibility, are primarily governed by the repetitive regions of the proteins that constitute the fiber, the major ampullate spidroins (MaSps).…
Spider silk possesses unique mechanical properties like large extensibility, high tensile strength, super-contractility, etc. Understanding these mechanical responses require characterization of the rheological properties of silk beyond the…
Graphene nanowiggles (GNW) are graphene-based nanostructures obtained by making alternated regular cuts in pristine graphene nanoribbons. GNW were recently synthesized and it was demonstrated that they exhibit tunable electronic and…
Solar steam generation technology can utilize abundant and renewable solar energy for many applications. In this work, we proposed a solar steam generator using wick material with wrapped graphene nanoparticles, and the energy efficiency…
Graphene nanoribbons present diverse electronic properties ranging from semiconducting to half-metallic, depending on their geometry, dimensions and chemical composition. Here we present a route to control these properties via externally…
Spider capture silk is a biomaterial with both high strength and high elasticity, but the structural design principle underlying these remarkable properties is still unknown. It was revealed recently by atomic force microscopy that, an…
The fracture strength of ZnO nanowires vertically grown on sapphire substrates was measured in tensile and bending experiments. Nanowires with diameters between 60 and 310 nm and a typical length of 2 um were manipulated with an atomic…
When humidified at different moisture conditions, restrained spider silk fibers can exhibit a very high supercontraction phenomenon. The hydration water molecules induce a Hydrogen-bonds disruption process that, due to entropic effects,…
Graphene's exceptional mechanical properties, including its highest-known stiffness (1 TPa) and strength (100 GPa) have been exploited for various structural applications. However, graphene is also known to be quite brittle, with…
Recently, the strain engineering of two-dimensional materials such as graphene has attracted considerable attention for its great potential in functional nanodevices. Here, we theoretically and experimentally investigate the strain…