A Big Jump in Nacre-inspired Strong, Tough Composites

To achieve structural order and strength-toughness balance similar to natural composites like nacre has been highly challenging, especially in a practically viable manner. Liu et al. developed a continuous preparation method to construct such high performance composites through a superspreading strategy at the oil/water/hydrogel interface. Exploiting the strong shear force at the interface, nanoparticles, such as nanosheets and nanotubes oriented and stacked together rapidly(as short as 358 ms) and the composites revealed the tensile strength and fracture toughness far higher those of natural nacre(9.0 and 20.4 times higher). This work has been published in Nature, 2020.