Bioinspired material to replace plastic

Modern life relies heavily on plastics, even though their petroleum-based production creates serious environmental challenges. The industry currently lacks sustainable alternatives due to their limited mechanical properties or complex manufacturing processes. An advanced strategy is therefore extremely necessary to design and manufacture sustainable high performance structural materials.

Just a new bio-inspired material is now available to replace petroleum-based plastics. A team led by Prof. Shu-Hong Yu of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) reports a method to produce materials with a structure similar to mother of pearl from wood fiber and mica, with adaptation to mass production, good machinability, and tunable coloring.

Natural mother of pearl has a hierarchically ordered structure at multiscale levels, just like bricks and mortar, which allows it to be both strength and tough. Inspired by mother-of-pearl, the researchers mimic the orderly structure of brick and mortar using TiO₂ microplate in mica coated (TiO₂-mica) and cellulose nanofiber (CNF) with the proposed directional deforming assembly method.

This method directly presses the TiO hydrogel₂-mica and CNF, while keeping the dimensions unchanged in the flat directions. The thickness of the hydrogel is drastically reduced and the materials are built directly with the highly ordered brick and mortar structure.

At the nanoscale, TiO₂ nano-grains on the TiO surface₂-mica leads to efficient energy dissipation by frictional sliding during TiO₂– removable mica. All the hierarchically ordered structure at multiscale levels contributes to the redistribution of the load and to the improvement of robustness.

The obtained materials have excellent strength (~ 281 MPa) and toughness (~ 11.5 MPa m1 / 2), which are more than 2 times higher than those of high-performance engineering polymers (for example, polyamides, aromatic polycarbonate), making it a strong competitor to petroleum-based plastics.

Even better, these materials adapt to temperatures between -130 ° C and 250 ° C, while ordinary plastics easily soften at high temperatures. Therefore, such materials are safer and more reliable at high or variable temperatures.

Provided by the University of Science and Technology of China