• Question: what is the strongest fibre in the world

    Asked by badgerboy to David, Luna, Probash on 24 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Probash Chowdhury

      Probash Chowdhury answered on 24 Mar 2011:

      I think it’s the silk thread from a spider’s web. It can hold a heavy load for ist size and weight. If it was enlarged to the size of a tow rope for a car it would probably be strong enough to pull a building down (just a guess at that last bit)

    • Photo: David Pyle

      David Pyle answered on 24 Mar 2011:

      A measure of the strength of fibre is the ‘tensile strength’, which has the units of pressure, Pa (pascals). The strongest commercially available carbon fibre typically has a strength of about 5 billion pascals (5 GPa, or 5 gigapascals). Steel cables, and the synthetic material kevlar can also have similar tensile strengths.

      Graphene, which is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms bonded in a two-dimensional hexagonal arrangement, has a mechanical strength of 150 GPa. But it may be a while before graphene fibre is commercially available! Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics last year for their work on graphene.

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