Nanotechnology Now - Press Release: Biomimetic micro/nanoscale fiber reinforced composites

Through microstructural observation, we can find that many biological materials, including fish scale, crab claw and bone, all have typical twisted plywood structure that consists of highly ordered arrangement of micro/nanoscale fiber lamellas. They are structurally sophisticated natural fiber reinforced composites and often exhibit excellent damage tolerance that is urgently needed but difficult to be obtained for engineering structural materials. Therefore, fully mimicking this kind of natural hierarchical structure and interfacial design, by using artificial synthetic and abundant one-dimensional micro/nanoscale fibers as building blocks, is expected to produce high-performance new-style artificial structural materials that are expected to exceed existing engineering structural materials. However, due to the lack of micro/nanoscale assembly technology, especially the lack of means to efficiently integrate one-dimensional micro/nanoscale structural units into macroscopic bulk form, mimicking natural fiber reinforced composites has always been a major challenge, and there has rarely been reported so far.

In response to this challenge, recently, inspired by the micro/nanoscale twisted plywood structure of the natural Arapaima giga scale armour (a-d), for the first time, the biomimetic research team led by Professor Shu-Hong Yu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) proposed a high-efficient bottom-up 'brushing-and-laminating' assembly strategy (e-f) with the biocompatible micro/nanofibers as structural units, successfully fabricated three-dimensional bulk biomimetic twisted plywood structural materials (g). Through hierarchically controlling the fiber alignment in the biopolymer matrix, the mechanical properties of resultant materials can be precisely modulated. It was found that the obtained artificial materials highly replicate the multiscale structure and toughening mechanisms of their natural counterparts, realizing excellent mechanical properties far beyond fundamental structural components and can be comparable with those of natural bone and many other natural and artificial materials. More importantly, the proposed assembly strategy is eco-friendly, programmed and scalable, and can be easily extended to other materials systems. Therefore, it provides a new technological space for designing more advanced biomimetic fiber reinforced structural materials (especially armour protection materials).

About Science China PressThe National Science Review is the first comprehensive scholarly journal released in English in China that is aimed at linking the country's rapidly advancing community of scientists with the global frontiers of science and technology. The journal also aims to shine a worldwide spotlight on scientific research advances across China.