Damage shielding mechanisms in hierarchical composites in nature with potential for design of tougher structural materials.

ABSTRACT: Load-carrying materials in nature, such as wood and bone, consist of relatively simple building blocks assembled into a hierarchical structure, ranging from the molecular scale up to the macroscopic level. This results in composites with a combination of high strength and high toughness, showing very large fracture surfaces indicating energy dissipation by cracking on multiple length scales. Man-made composites instead consist typically of fibres embedded in a uniform matrix, and frequently show brittle failure through the growth of critical clusters of broken fibres. In this paper, a hierarchical structure inspired by wood is presented. It is designed to incapacitate cluster growth, with the aim of retaining high strength. This is done by introducing new structural levels of successively

SUBMITTER: Marthin O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6458393 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature