Tough, Bio-Inspired Hybrid Materials

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...

Bio-Inspired Self-Actuating Composite Materials

Bio-Inspired, Smart, Multiscale Interfacial Materials

In this review a strategy for the design of bioinspired, smart, multiscale interfacial (BSMI) materials is presented and put into context with recent progress in the field of BSMI materials spanning natural to artificial to reversibly stimuli-sensitive interfaces. BSMI materials that respond to single/dual/multiple external stimuli, e.g., light, pH, electrical fields, and so on, can switch reve...

Bio-inspired Design of Intelligent Materials

Several examples of sensors and actuators inherent in biological species are reviewed with emphasis on their mechanisms for a given set of stimuli. Examples include, action plants (Venus flytrap, Cucumber tendrils) and bamboo, and algae. Based on theses examples and their mechanisms, we designed artificial actuators, FGM piezo actuators and electroactive polymer actuators.