The thinnest fibres in the world

A young scientist from Canterbury University is making thread that is so thin it is invisible to the naked eye. The threads can be woven into super-strong products.

Jon Stanger, who is currently studying for his PhD, won a MacDiarmid Young Scientists of the Year Award for his work in nano fibres. He has been building special electrospinning machines with scientists and technicians from Crop & Food Research that are now being sold to research laboratories around the world.

His inspiration for the machines and research was his attempt to copy the way a spider spins its web. The silk produced by a spider’s spinneret is stronger than steel of the same diameter.

The electrospinning machines can spin fibre down to 100 nanometres in diameter, which is about ten thousandths of the thickness of a human hair and smaller than the wavelength of visible light. This means you can’t see the individual fibres, although over time you can see an opaque mat of fine fibres forming.

The electrospinning machines use polymer substances like proteins and cellulose to make the super-fine threads. In the near future the fine-but-very-strong threads might be used for lots of different things. Some of the suggestions include making replacement skin or bone for people, new packaging materials and bioremediation (cleaning up the environment).

Nick Tucker, Research Leader in biomaterials for Crop & Food Research, says electrospinning does not use high temperatures or damaging chemicals and the resulting fibres have exceptional properties.

“The traditional way of working with natural materials is to dismantle the original structure, for example a tree, and reconstruct it into something that has poorer properties, for example a kitchen unit. This method allows us to create a very fine fibre that has mechanical properties, such as strength, that mirror those of the original material.”

One of the materials being trialled is marine collagen (a waste product from hoki processing in New Zealand).

New Zealand already exports collagens from cows (which are guaranteed to be mad cow disease-free) and there could be demand for high value, electrospun material made from marine collagen.