Advanced Structural Materials by Bioinspiration

Abstract

In the quest of increasing safety and efficiency in structural applications, by designing and manufacturing new strong and tough composite materials, learning from the design of natural materials can be a promising strategy. Nature has evolved for billions of years to develop elaborate architectures and sophisticated strategies, based on mechano-biological mechanisms, to achieve optimally adapted material solutions. A brief review of exemplar naturally occurring materials is provided, here, with a focus on their multiscale structures and the mechanisms governing their mechanical properties. The design motifs, common to biological structural materials, and the mechanisms underlying their characteristics are summarized, with a highlight on the structureproperty relationship. A review of recent advancement in the manufacturing of bio-inspired composite materials, mainly inspired by bone, nacre, and teeth, is provided, followed by recent and successful case studies. In this paper, the main focus is on nacre and bone-inspired structural materials, aimed at mimicking the mechanical behavior. Finally, a critical discussion is provided, highlighting the limitations of the current innovative techniques and materials, and prospecting the future challenges for the design and development of de novo materials and manufacturing processes for real engineering applications.

Stress Reduction of 3D Printed Compliance‐Tailored Multilayers

“…If the correct levels of spatial-tailoring (both properties and scale) in the bondlayer can be achieved, for example, in structural composite adhesive joining, performance may approach what some have called optimal design of such interfaces by bio-mimicking. [33,[51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] While the tailoring considered here imparts large improvements to the multilayer, even a small design improvement of such joints in application can lead to large benefits, for example, the 2017 GMC Acadia sport utility vehicle is 700 pounds lighter than the version it replaced, contributing a 28% improvement in gas mileage, due primarily to the use of improved joining materials. [48] Compliance-tailoring of the bondlayer is an additional and facile approach to improving joint performance in both short and long, relative to critical shear transfer length, bonding applications.…”

Mechanical Metamaterials and Their Engineering Applications

“…On the other hand, numerous materials found in nature often exhibit intriguing properties unachievable with conventional materials . These natural materials, particularly cellular materials, have evolved over the course of several million years such that they developed an optimized architecture which could span over multiple hierarchies across different length scales .…”

“…On the other hand, numerous materials found in nature often exhibit intriguing properties unachievable with conventional materials . These natural materials, particularly cellular materials, have evolved over the course of several million years such that they developed an optimized architecture which could span over multiple hierarchies across different length scales . For instance, the highly complex porous architecture of a bone core consisting of intricately‐shaped ligaments and density gradients allows it to achieve a much higher structural efficiency compared to most of the synthetic cellular materials developed by humans, which possess significantly less sophisticated architectures and are far from ideal .…”

Cell‐Inspired All‐Aqueous Microfluidics: From Intracellular Liquid–Liquid Phase Separation toward Advanced Biomaterials

“…Nature has evolved for billions of years to develop elaborate and sophisticated living organisms, which can provide sources of inspired solutions for various intriguing and enduring scientific and technique questions . Although a single cell is the simplest unit of living organisms, it is rich in high degrees of structural and functional complexities .…”