ASP projects

Spider Silk: Inspired super-tough nanoarmours

Over the last few decades, the search for bio-inspired solutions has been widely accepted in many engineering and technological fields as the best way for optimizing and taking advantage of available resources. Nature over the ages has found its optimal solution for survival and our teams therefore looked at Nature for the design of device nanoarmour whose scope is essentially to save lives. Existing materials and technologies allow current engineering solutions to stop projectiles of different kinds but these existing devices do not safeguard against the penetration of minute fragments. The need for unconventional toughness suggests that we need to look for inspiration, for example, from spider silk or bombardier beetles. What follows is research at the leading edge of current material science and computational mechanics.

Principal Academic Tutor
Nicola Pugno
Structural, Geotechnical and Building Engineering, Politecnico di Torino

External Tutors
Paolo Cavallo
AMET S.r.l.

Academic Tutors
Alberto Corigliano
Structural Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Barbara Del Curto
Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “Giulio Natta”,
Politecnico di Milano

External institution
AMET S.r.l.

Team members
TEAM A
Bethany Neigebauer [Team Controller], Architecture
Sara Baronetto, Building Engineering
Stefano Bosetti, Mechanical Engineering
Flavio Caciuffo, Energy and Nuclear Engineering
Anna Gabriella Ciriolo, Physics Engineering
Gianni Robert Rehkopf, Design

TEAM B
Stefano Signetti [Team controller and Project Communication Coordinator], Civil Engineering
Francesco Buonora, Energy and Nuclear Engineering
Vito Mario De Leonardis, Mechanical Engineering
Lorenzo Rossini, Aerospace Engineering

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