Making replacements for the human body similar to natural tissue offers significant advantages but remains a key challenge. This is pertinent for synthetic dental materials which rarely reproduce the actual properties of human teeth and generally demonstrate relatively poor damage-tolerance. Here we report on new bioinspired ceramic-polymer composites with nacre-mimetic lamellar and brick-and-mortar architectures which resemble, respectively, human dentin and enamel in hardness, stiffness and strength and exhibit exceptional fracture toughness. These composites are additionally distinguished by outstanding machinability, energy-dissipating capability under cyclic loading, and diminished abrasion to antagonist teeth. The underlying design principles and toughening mechanisms of these materials are elucidated in terms of their distinct architectures. We demonstrate that these composites are promising candidates for dental applications, such as new-generation tooth replacements. Finally, we believe that this notion of bioinspired design of new materials with unprecedented biologically-comparable properties can be extended to a wide range of material-systems for improved mechanical performance.
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