Soft network composite materials with deterministic and bio-inspired designs

Soft network composite materials with deterministic and bio-inspired designs

Hard and soft structural composites found in biology provide inspiration for the design of advanced synthetic materials. Many examples of bio-inspired hard materials can be found in the literature; far less attention has been devoted to soft systems. Here we introduce deterministic routes to low-modulus thin film materials with stress/strain responses that can be tailored precisely to match the...

Bio-Inspired Self-Actuating Composite Materials

Designing Bio-Inspired Composite Materials for Medical Applications

Composite materials are multi-phased combinations of two or several components, which acquire new characteristic properties that the individual constituents, by themselves, cannot obtain. A composite material typically consists of a certain matrix containing one or more fillers which can be made up of particles, sheets or fibers. When at least one of these phases has dimensions less than 100 nm...

Tough, bio-inspired hybrid materials.

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 that are extremely difficult to replicate synthetically. We emulate nature's toughening mechanisms by combining two ordinary compounds, aluminum oxide...

Bio-inspired materials: unnatural life.

A t the turn of the nineteenth century, Pieter Harting and George Rainey laid the foundations of a science called “synthetic morphology”1. The inspiration for the name probably came from Wöhler’s discovery of urea synthesis in 1828, a breakthrough commonly perceived to mark the beginning of synthetic organic chemistry. The primary goal of Harting and Rainey’s synthetic morphology was to explain...