Background

Natural silk produced by silkworms has been used to make fabrics for thousands of years. More recently, silkworm silk has been used to fabricate biodegradable medical implants, protective fabrics, and biodegradable wearable electronics. However, existing techniques for manufacturing electrical circuit components from silkworm silk require post processing to incorporate functional properties into the silkworm silk and can be non-scalable and/or cost prohibitive.

Technology Overview

Functionalized natural silk fibers have been fabricated by feeding silkworms with the material of interest. Specifically, this work highlights the possibility of using natural silk fibers as super‑capacitor electrodes upon feeding the worms with high capacitive materials such as graphite, Monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2) , Titanium dioxide (TiO 2) , and Potassium permanganate (KMnO4) / Manganese(II) chloride (MnCl 2).

Further Detail

Publications : Basant A. Ali & Nageh K. Allam. (2019) “Silkworms as a factory of functional wearable energy storage fabrics”‑ Scientific Reports, volume 9, Article number: 12649 ‑ Nature.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49193-y

Benefits

• One-step fabrication
• Tuned distribution of the additives
• Full control of the amount incorporated

Applications

Electrical Circuit components made from Silkworm-Silk with numerous applications including:

• Wearable devices/sensors
• Biodegradable medical implants
• Durable protective fabrics
• Eco-friendly wearable electronics
• Super‑capacitors

Opportunity

• Available for exclusive and non-exclusive licensing
• Exclusive/non-exclusive evaluation for defined period (set up for options).
• Collaborative/supportive research