THE TENSILE BEHAVIOUR OF SPIDER SILK

Abstract

Spider silk has attracted the interest of several researchers in recent years because it displays a unique combination of high tensile strength, high breaking strain and an ultra-low weight. Hitherto, the focus has always been on dragline and viscid silk, whereas research on spider cocoon silk is limited. In order to explain the structure-property relationship of spider silk, the stress-strain behaviour of cocoon and dragline silk is compared in this study. It is shown that both fibres have completely different stress-strain behaviours.In addition, the influence of the testing speed is investigated. For cocoon silk, lower testing speeds result in lower strength, stiffness and higher post-modulus. When the stress-strain curve is simulated by an extended Maxwell model, as testing speed increases, the level of the hardening region is higher, the yield region moves to higher strains and the hardening region in the stress-strain curve becomes more horizontal. However, a speed of 20 mm/min can be considered as a saturation point where the effect of the speed decreases. The influence of the testing speed on dragline silk is clearly less pronounced than for cocoon silk. However, a more detailed study of the stress-strain curves of dragline revealed different possible shapes for the stress-strain behaviour of dragline silk.