This means that there is a non-constant acceleration on this rising web.

With a slower web there is also less air resistance. This means that I will just have to guess at a value for C.

If a web is like a cylinder, a longer cylinder (as the web shoots out) has a different drag coefficient than a shorter web. The problem is with the value of C which is a coefficient that depends on the shape of the object. Here ρ is the density of air at about 1.2 kg/m 3 and A is the cross sectional area of the web. I could use the typical model for air resistance that say the force from air is proportional to the square of the speed: I’ll admit that calculating the air resistance in this case can be quite tricky. That doesn’t seem too bad, does it? But wait. Sure, you could have just used one of the kinematic equations but what fun would that be? Using a the value for the change in height of 30 meters, the web launch speed would be 24.2 m/s (54 mph). Now I can use the average velocity and this time interval to get an expression for the change in vertical position.Īnd there is your expression for the launch speed of the web. Here is a look at my device looking down the arm. Now I can calculate the thickness of this container. In my web container design, I will let the cartridge go back 10 cm along my arm. What would this look like if it fit around a wrist? If I use my own wrist for a basis, then I find that it has a circumference of 16.5 cm. That gives a total volume (per hand) of 0.00314 m 3. In that case, we can find the web volume estimation by a factor of 50. If I were Spider-Man, that’s what I would want. Well, then how big of a container would he need to have a reasonable number of shots? Let’s say he wants 50 uses of the web for each hand. That’s a long pencil and remember, that’s for just one of his typical web shots. If all of this webbing was put into a pencil, the pencil would be 3.2 m long.

How about a comparison to the volume of a standard pencil with a radius of 0.25 cm. That might be a little difficult to visualize in terms of the size. This would put the total web volume for one use at 6.28 x 10 -5 m 3. Well, the steel cable could work but it would have to be much thicker with a radius of 2.5 mm. Carbon nanotube rope: 1.98 x 10 5 Newtonsīased on these calculations, it looks like carbon nanotube rope is the only thing that would work.If I replaced the web with real materials of the same size, this would be their maximum tension (based on the values from Wikipedia). Let me approximate the web shot from Spider-Man as a cylindrical shape with a radius of 1 mm. Here comes the first wild estimate (ok, not the first). In order to get a maximum tension, you need to know the cross sectional area of the wire since obviously thicker wires are stronger. This is the maximum tension per cross sectional area that the material can withstand before breaking and is measured in units of MPa (mega Pascals - or 10 6 Newtons/m 2. The strength of a material can be describe by the ultimate tensile strength. Let’s use this value to make a comparison to other web-like options.

Spider hanging from a web wallpaper