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Bioinspired structural materials

Abstract

Natural structural materials are built at ambient temperature from a fairly limited selection of components. They usually comprise hard and soft phases arranged in complex hierarchical architectures, with characteristic dimensions spanning from the nanoscale to the macroscale. The resulting materials are lightweight and often display unique combinations of strength and toughness, but have proven difficult to mimic synthetically. Here, we review the common design motifs of a range of natural structural materials, and discuss the difficulties associated with the design and fabrication of synthetic structures that mimic the structural and mechanical characteristics of their natural counterparts.

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Figure 1: Material-property chart, and projections for natural and synthetic materials.
Figure 2: Hierarchical structure of bone and bamboo.
Figure 3: Healthy human cortical bone resists fracture through complementary intrinsic and extrinsic contributions throughout its hierarchical structure.
Figure 4: The hierarchical structure and properties of nacre.
Figure 5: Processing of nacre-like structures by freeze casting.
Figure 6: Additive-manufacturing techniques.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Mechanical Behavior of Materials Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. U.G.K.W. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation through CMMI-1200408. E.S. acknowledges support from the European Commission (FP7 Programme, reintegration grant BISM). We are grateful to many colleagues and collaborators, J. Kerr and M. Snead in particular, for helpful discussions. We would also like to thank S. Russell for helpful comments in editing this manuscript, and A. Lapp and Z. Deretsky from LevelFive.com for help with the figures.

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Correspondence to Ulrike G. K. Wegst or Robert O. Ritchie.

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Wegst, U., Bai, H., Saiz, E. et al. Bioinspired structural materials. Nature Mater 14, 23–36 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4089

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