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Autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design

Strong and tough natural composites such as bone, silk or nacre are often built from stiff blocks bound together using thin interfacial soft layers that can also provide sacrificial bonds for self-repair. Here we show that it is possible exploit this design in order to create self-healing structural...

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Autores principales: D’Elia, Eleonora, Eslava, Salvador, Miranda, Miriam, Georgiou, Theoni K., Saiz, Eduardo
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4857079/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27146382
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep25059
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author D’Elia, Eleonora
Eslava, Salvador
Miranda, Miriam
Georgiou, Theoni K.
Saiz, Eduardo
author_facet D’Elia, Eleonora
Eslava, Salvador
Miranda, Miriam
Georgiou, Theoni K.
Saiz, Eduardo
author_sort D’Elia, Eleonora
collection PubMed
description Strong and tough natural composites such as bone, silk or nacre are often built from stiff blocks bound together using thin interfacial soft layers that can also provide sacrificial bonds for self-repair. Here we show that it is possible exploit this design in order to create self-healing structural composites by using thin supramolecular polymer interfaces between ceramic blocks. We have built model brick-and-mortar structures with ceramic contents above 95 vol% that exhibit strengths of the order of MPa (three orders of magnitude higher than the interfacial polymer) and fracture energies that are two orders of magnitude higher than those of the glass bricks. More importantly, these properties can be fully recovered after fracture without using external stimuli or delivering healing agents. This approach demonstrates a very promising route towards the design of strong, ideal self-healing materials able to self-repair repeatedly without degradation or external stimuli.
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spelling pubmed-48570792016-05-18 Autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design D’Elia, Eleonora Eslava, Salvador Miranda, Miriam Georgiou, Theoni K. Saiz, Eduardo Sci Rep Article Strong and tough natural composites such as bone, silk or nacre are often built from stiff blocks bound together using thin interfacial soft layers that can also provide sacrificial bonds for self-repair. Here we show that it is possible exploit this design in order to create self-healing structural composites by using thin supramolecular polymer interfaces between ceramic blocks. We have built model brick-and-mortar structures with ceramic contents above 95 vol% that exhibit strengths of the order of MPa (three orders of magnitude higher than the interfacial polymer) and fracture energies that are two orders of magnitude higher than those of the glass bricks. More importantly, these properties can be fully recovered after fracture without using external stimuli or delivering healing agents. This approach demonstrates a very promising route towards the design of strong, ideal self-healing materials able to self-repair repeatedly without degradation or external stimuli. Nature Publishing Group 2016-05-05 /pmc/articles/PMC4857079/ /pubmed/27146382 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep25059 Text en Copyright © 2016, Macmillan Publishers Limited http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
D’Elia, Eleonora
Eslava, Salvador
Miranda, Miriam
Georgiou, Theoni K.
Saiz, Eduardo
Autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design
title Autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design
title_full Autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design
title_fullStr Autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design
title_full_unstemmed Autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design
title_short Autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design
title_sort autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4857079/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27146382
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep25059
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