An all-natural bioinspired structural material for plastic replacement

Qing-Fang Guan,Huai-Bin Yang,Zhang-Chi Ling,Shu-Hong Yu,Zi-Meng Han

doi:10.1038/s41467-020-19174-1

Abstract

Petroleum-based plastics are useful but they pose a great threat to the environment and human health. It is highly desirable yet challenging to develop sustainable structural materials with excellent mechanical and thermal properties for plastic replacement. Here, inspired by nacre’s multiscale architecture, we report a simple and efficient so called “directional deforming assembly” method to manufacture high-performance structural materials with a unique combination of high strength (281 MPa), high toughness (11.5 MPa m1/2), high stiffness (20 GPa), low coefficient of thermal expansion (7 × 10−6 K−1) and good thermal stability. Based on all-natural raw materials (cellulose nanofiber and mica microplatelet), the bioinspired structural material possesses better mechanical and thermal properties than petroleum-based plastics, making it a high-performance and eco-friendly alternative structural material to substitute plastics.

Highlights

Petroleum-based plastics are useful but they pose a great threat to the environment and human health
Until now, sustainable structural materials constructed from bio-resources suffer from either limited mechanical properties or complex manufacturing processes, resulting in high cost and difficulty to produce in large scale[1,2,9]
From the perspective of plastic replacement, through biomimetic design, the sustainable structural materials with the brick-and-mortar structure can exceed the limitation of poor mechanical properties

Summary

Introduction

Petroleum-based plastics are useful but they pose a great threat to the environment and human health. Based on all-natural raw materials (cellulose nanofiber and mica microplatelet), the bioinspired structural material possesses better mechanical and thermal properties than petroleum-based plastics, making it a high-performance and eco-friendly alternative structural material to substitute plastics. There is no panacea for these complex environmental problems[1], one option is to develop sustainable high-performance structural materials to partly substitute petroleum-based plastics. If complex manufacturing processes can be simplified, all-natural bioinspired high-performance structural materials will be the good substitutes for petroleum-based plastics. We develop a simple and robust method with biomimetic design, named as “directional deforming assembly”, which can be applied for further scale-up in an efficient way By this directional deforming assembly method, we successfully manufacture allnatural bioinspired high-performance structural materials from prepared cellulose nanofiber (CNF) and TiO2-coated mica microplatelet (TiO2-mica) composite hydrogel. Good processability, and tunable coloration allow it to be used to fabricate a series of advanced, beautiful, and durable structural materials to replace plastics, for example, structural support for high-end personal electronic devices

Methods

Results

Conclusion