Abstract
Summary Amorphous minerals in natural nacre are found to bond easily with organic macromolecules to create strong inorganic/organic hybrid structural units which are essential to improve the nacre's mechanical response. Here, we first prepare a new kind of amorphous artificial nacre (AAN) with a highly aligned lamellar architecture, inspired by nacre's unique amorphous-reinforced architecture. The mechanical properties of AAN are improved dramatically, with super-high toughness of ∼103.5 MJ·m−3 and super plasticity of ∼500.0%, profiting from the co-effect of efficient energy dissipation at the amorphous-reinforced hybrid interfaces and the large interfacial plastic deformation on multi-level scales, and far exceeding nearly all reported polylactic acid-based materials and most bio-inspired composites. Our findings should help in understanding the evolutionary advantage of the amorphous-reinforced phase in natural materials. This amorphous-reinforced design strategy will open a promising route to synthesize high-performance amorphous composites.
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