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Materials that are strong, ultra-light weight and tough are in demand for a range of applications, requiring architectures and components carefully designed from the micrometer down to nanometer scales. Nacre-a structure found in many…
To respond to the increasing need for bone repair strategies, various types of biomaterials have been developed. Among those, calcium phosphate ceramics (CPCs) are promising since they possess a chemical composition similar to that of…
Nature provides many paradigms for the design and fabrication of artificial composite materials. Inspired by the relationship between the well-ordered architecture and biopolymers found in natural nacre, we present a facile strategy to…
Due to their exceptional mechanical and chemical properties and their natural abundance, cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) are promising building blocks of sustainable polymer composites. However, the rapid gelation of CNC dispersions has…
Extrusion 3D-printing of biopolymers and natural fiber-based biocomposites allows for the fabrication of complex structures, ranging from gels for healthcare applications to eco-friendly structural materials. However, traditional polymer…
Glasses have numerous applications due to their exceptional transparency, however, poor fracture and impact resistance limit their applications as an engineering material. One relatively recent approach to improve the mechanical properties…
Electronically conductive protein-based materials could enable the creation of bioelectronic components and devices from sustainable and nontoxic materials, while also being well-suited to interface with biological systems, such as living…
Catastrophic failure of materials and structures due to unstable crack growth could be prevented if facture toughness could be enhanced at will through structural design, but how can this be possible if fracture toughness is a material…
High strength and high toughness are usually mutually exclusive in engineering materials. Improving the toughness of strong but brittle materials like ceramics thus relies on the introduction of a metallic or polymeric ductile phase to…
We investigate the damping enhancement in a class of biomimetic staggered composites via a combination of design, modeling, and experiment. In total, three kinds of staggered composites are designed by mimicking the structure of bone and…
A fibrous herringbone-modified helicoidal architecture is identified within the exocuticle of an impact-resistant crustacean appendage. This previously unreported composite microstructure, which features highly textured apatite mineral…
One of the limitations of electrospun collagen as bone-like fibrous structure is the potential collagen triple helix denaturation in the fibre state and the corresponding inadequate wet stability even after crosslinking. Here, we have…
Nanofibrillated cellulose, a polymer that can be obtained from one of the most abundant biopolymers in Nature, is being increasingly explored due to its outstanding properties for packaging and device applications. Still, open challenges in…
Polymer composites are ideal candidates for next generation biomimetic soft materials because of their exquisite bottom-up designability. However, the richness of behaviours comes at a price: the need for precise and extensive…
The exciting properties of micro- and nano-patterned surfaces found in natural species hide a virtually endless potential of technological ideas, opening new opportunities for innovation and exploitation in materials science and…
The control of ice nucleation and growth is critical in many natural and engineering situations. Yet, very few compounds are able to interact directly with the surface of ice crystals. Ice-structuring proteins, found in certain fishes,…
Renewable and biodegradable plastics derived from soy protein isolate (SPI) offer a promising alternative to conventional petroleum-based plastics, particularly for film-grade bioplastics applications such as plastic bags. However, even…
Natural hard composites like human bone possess a combination of strength and toughness that exceeds that of their constituents and of many engineered composites. This augmentation is attributed to their complex hierarchical structure,…
The methodologies of bioinspiration, biomimetics, and bioreplication are inevitably pointing to the incorporation of multifunctionality in engineered materials when designing ever more complex systems. Optimal multifunctionality is also the…
Recent advancements in machine learning techniques for protein folding motivate better results in its inverse problem -- protein design. In this work we introduce a new graph mimetic neural network, MimNet, and show that it is possible to…