Slip knots and unfastening topologies enhance toughness without reducing strength of silk fibroin fibres

The combination of high strength and high toughness is a desirable feature that structural materials should display. However, while in the past, engineers had to compromise on either strength or toughness depending on the requested application, nowadays, new toughening strategies are available to provide strong materials with high toughness. In this paper, we focus on one of such strategy, which requires no chemical treatment, but the implementation of slip knots with optimized shape and size in the involved material, which is silkworm silk in this case. In particular, a variety of slip knot topologies with different unfastening mechanisms are investigated, including even complex knots usually used in the textile industry, and their efficiency in enhancing toughness of silk fibres is discussed.