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Bioinspired composites

Making a tooth mimic

Nature Materials volume 14, pages 1082–1083 (2015)Cite this article

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An additive manufacturing technique makes heterogeneous composites with tunable local microstructure and composition.

Studart and co-authors' technique relies on the traditional method of slip casting, often used to fabricate complex ceramic objects. In slip casting, a suspension of particles is locally consolidated on the walls of a porous mould, through which the carrier fluid, but not the particles, can pass. As the liquid phase moves via capillary forces into the pores of the mould, the local particle concentration increases in the vicinity of the walls until the particles become jammed. As the jammed layer becomes thicker, its position for a given set of experimental conditions can be predicted by measuring its growth kinetics. By taking advantage of this, and by applying a time-dependent magnetic field (through the controlled movement of the mould around a magnet) to align anisotropic particles coated with superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles7, the authors were able to control the 3D orientation of particle-reinforced composites over length scales of several hundreds of micrometres. In particular, they fabricated tough and strong composite materials by dispersing 250-μm-thick, ∼10-μm-diameter alumina platelets in a controlled way within metallic, polymeric and ceramic matrices, creating layers with a twisted-plywood structure.

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Figure 1: Examples of heterogeneous composites.
Figure 2: Tooth mimic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. John W. C. Dunlop and Peter Fratzl are in the Department of Biomaterials, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Research Campus Golm, 14424 Potsdam, Germany,

    John W. C. Dunlop & Peter Fratzl

Authors
  1. John W. C. Dunlop
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  2. Peter Fratzl
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Correspondence to Peter Fratzl.

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Dunlop, J., Fratzl, P. Making a tooth mimic. Nature Mater 14, 1082–1083 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4466

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