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.

The attainment of both strength and toughness is a vital requirement for most structural materials; unfortunately these properties are generally mutually exclusive. Although the quest continues for stronger and harder materials, these have little to no use as bulk structural materials without appropriate fracture resistance. It is the lower-strength, and hence higher-toughness, materials that find use for most safety-critical applications where premature or, worse still, catastrophic fracture is unacceptable. For these reasons, the development of strong and tough (damage-tolerant) materials has traditionally been an exercise in compromise between hardness versus ductility. Drawing examples from metallic glasses, natural and biological materials, and structural and biomimetic ceramics, we examine some of the newer strategies in dealing with this conflict. Specifically, we focus on the interplay between the mechanisms that individually contribute to strength and toughness, noting that these phenomena can originate from very different lengthscales in a material's structural architecture. We show how these new and natural materials can defeat the conflict of strength versus toughness and achieve unprecedented levels of damage tolerance within their respective material classes.

High-entropy alloys are equiatomic, multi-element systems that can crystallize as a single phase, despite containing multiple elements with different crystal structures. A rationale for this is that the configurational entropy contribution to the total free energy in alloys with five or more major elements may stabilize the solid-solution state relative to multiphase microstructures. We examined a five-element high-entropy alloy, CrMnFeCoNi, which forms a single-phase face-centered cubic solid solution, and found it to have exceptional damage tolerance with tensile strengths above 1 GPa and fracture toughness values exceeding 200 MPa·m(1/2). Furthermore, its mechanical properties actually improve at cryogenic temperatures; we attribute this to a transition from planar-slip dislocation activity at room temperature to deformation by mechanical nanotwinning with decreasing temperature, which results in continuous steady strain hardening.

The notion of mimicking natural structures in the synthesis of new structural materials has generated enormous interest but has yielded few practical advances. Natural composites achieve strength and toughness through complex hierarchical designs extremely difficult to replicate synthetically. Here we emulate Nature's toughening mechanisms through the combination of two ordinary compounds, aluminum oxide and polymethylmethacrylate, into ice-templated structures whose toughness can be over 300 times (in energy terms) that of their constituents. The final product is a bulk hybrid ceramic material whose high yield strength and fracture toughness (~200 MPa and ~30 MPa√m) provide specific properties comparable to aluminum alloys. These model materials can be used to identify the key microstructural features that should guide the synthesis of bio-inspired ceramic-based composites with unique strength and toughness.With the quest for more efficient energy-related technologies, there is an imperative to develop lightweight, high-performance structural materials that possess both exceptional strength and toughness. Unfortunately, these two properties tend to be mutually exclusive and the attainment of optimal mechanical performance is invariably a compromise often achieved through the empirical design of microstructures. Nature has long developed the ability to combine brittle minerals and organic molecules into hybrid composites with exceptional fracture resistance and structural capabilities (1-3); indeed, many natural materials like bone, wood and nacre (abalone shell) have highly sophisticated structures with complex hierarchical designs whose properties are far in excess what could be expected from a simple mixture of their components (2,4). Biological mineralized composites, in particular bone, dentin and nacre (5-7), can generate fracture toughness (i.e., resistance to the initiation and growth of a crack) primarily by extrinsic toughening mechanisms (8) that "shield" any crack from the applied loads. These mechanisms, which are quite different to those that toughen metals for

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One of the most intriguing protein materials found in nature is bone, a material composed of assemblies of tropocollagen molecules and tiny hydroxyapatite mineral crystals that form an extremely tough, yet lightweight, adaptive and multifunctional material. Bone has evolved to provide structural support to organisms, and therefore its mechanical properties are of great physiological relevance. In this article, we review the structure and properties of bone, focusing on mechanical deformation and fracture behavior from the perspective of the multidimensional hierarchical nature of its structure. In fact, bone derives its resistance to fracture with a multitude of deformation and toughening mechanisms at many size scales ranging from the nanoscale structure of its protein molecules to the macroscopic physiological scale.

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Few engineering materials are limited by their strength; rather they are limited by their resistance to fracture or fracture toughness. It is not by accident that most critical structures, such as bridges, ships, nuclear pressure vessels and so forth, are manufactured from materials that are comparatively low in strength but high in toughness. Indeed, in many classes of materials, strength and toughness are almost mutually exclusive. In the first instance, such resistance to fracture is a function of bonding and crystal structure (or lack thereof), but can be developed through the design of appropriate nano/microstructures. However, the creation of tough microstructures in structural materials, i.e., metals, polymers, ceramics and their composites, is invariably a compromise between resistance to intrinsic damage mechanisms ahead of the tip of a crack (intrinsic toughening) and the formation of crack-tip shielding mechanisms which principally act behind the tip to reduce the effective "crack-driving force" (extrinsic toughening).Intrinsic toughening is essentially an inherent property of a specific microstructure; it is the dominant form of toughening in ductile (e.g., metallic) materials. However, for most brittle (e.g., ceramic) solids, and this includes many biological materials, it is largely ineffective and toughening conversely must be developed extrinsically, by such shielding mechanisms as crack bridging. From a fracture mechanics perspective, this results in toughening in the form of rising resistance-curve behavior where the fracture resistance actually increases with crack extension. The implication of this is that in many biological and high-strength advanced materials, toughness is developed primarily during crack growth and not for crack initiation. This is an important realization yet is still rarely reflected in the way that toughness is measured, which is invariably involves the use of single-value (crack-initiation) parameters such as the fracture toughness KIc.