Materials combining lightweight, robust mechanical performances, and multifunctionality are highly desirable for engineering applications. Graphene aerogels have emerged as attractive candidates. Despite recent progresses, the bottleneck remains how to simultaneously achieve both strength resilience. While multiscale architecture designs may offer a possible route, difficulty lies in lack of design guidelines experimentally necessary structure control over multiple length scales. The latter...

Abstract Replicating nacre’s multiscale architecture represents a promising approach to design artificial materials with outstanding rigidity and toughness. It is highly desirable yet challenging incorporate self-healing shape-programming capabilities into nacre-mimetic composites due their high filler content. Here, we report such composite obtained by infiltrating thermally switchable Diels-Alder network polymer lamellar scaffold of alumina. The chemical bond switchability the physical...

Through designing hierarchical structures, particularly optimizing the chemical and architectural interactions at its inorganic/organic interface, nacre has achieved an excellent combination of contradictory mechanical properties such as strength toughness, which is highly demanded yet difficult to achieve by most synthetic materials. Most techniques applied develop nacre-mimetic composites have been focused on mimicking "brick-and-mortar" structure, but interfacial features, especially...

Aerogels have been considered as an ideal material for thermal insulation. Unfortunately, their application in textiles is greatly limited by fragility and poor processability. We overcame these issues encapsulating the aerogel fiber with a stretchable layer, mimicking core-shell structure of polar bear hair. Despite its high internal porosity over 90%, our up to 1000% strain, which improved compared that traditional fibers (~2% strain). In addition washability dyeability, mechanically...

Cellular materials with excellent mechanical efficiency are essential for aerospace structures, lightweight vehicles, and energy absorption. However, current synthetic cellular materials, such as lattice a unit cell arranged in an ordered hierarchy, still far behind many biological terms of both structural complexity performance. Here, the complex porous structure mechanics cuttlebone studied, which acts rigid buoyancy tank cuttlefish to resist large hydrostatic pressure deep-sea...

The demand for thermally conductive but electrically insulating materials has increased greatly in advanced electronic packaging. To this end, polymer-based composites filled with boron nitride (BN) nanosheets have been intensively studied as thermal interface material (TIM). However, it remains a great challenge to achieve isotropically ultrahigh conductivity BN/polymer due the inherent property anisotropy of BN and/or insufficient construction 3D network. Herein, we present...

Ice-templating holds promise to become a powerful technique construct high-performance bioinspired materials. Both ice nucleation and growth during the freezing process are crucial for final architecture of ice-templated material. However, effective ways control these two very important factors still lacking. Here, we demonstrate that successive preferential can be realized by introducing wettability gradient on cold finger. A bulk porous material with long-range lamellar pattern was...

Abstract Biological structural materials realize outstanding mechanical properties by assembling hard and soft components into complex hierarchical structures, which provide abundant inspirations for synthetic materials. Specifically, conch shell exhibits around ten times higher toughness than widely‐explored nacre due to its cross‐lamellar architecture at nano‐ macroscopic scales. Previously, conch‐shell‐inspired are realized 3D‐printing. However, it remains challenging translate the of...

Thermal management materials have become increasingly crucial for stretchable electronic devices and systems. Drastically different from conventional thermally conductive materials, which are applied at static conditions, thermal electronics additionally require strain-insensitive conductivity, as they generally undergo cyclic deformation. However, realizing such a property remains challenging mainly because polymer composites lack mechanically guided design. Here, we report honeycomb-like...

Graphene flake size has a profound effect on the mechanical performance of assembled graphene aerogels, particularly their strength, modulus and fatigue resistance under compression.

The extraordinary structural and mechanical features of nacre have been widely explored translated into synthetic layered materials through various methods. However, it still remains challenging to achieve scale-up fabrication these biomimetic materials, which is the main hurdle for their real applications. Herein, we report a facile, universal, scalable strategy produce bulk with nacre-mimetic architecture performance. This was realized by ordered nucleation ice crystals on nanogrooved...

Ice formation on solid surfaces is a ubiquitous process in our daily life, and ice orientation plays critical role anti-icing/deicing, organ cryo-preservation, material fabrication. Although previous studies have shown that surface grooves can regulate the of crystals, whether parallel or perpendicular alignment to still under debate. Here, we systematically investigate its oriented growth grooved through both situ observation theoretical simulation, discover remarkable size effect grooves....

Porous ceramic materials are attractive candidates for thermal insulation. However, effective ways to develop porous ceramics with high mechanical and insulation performances still lacking. Herein, an anisotropic silica hierarchical architecture, i.e. long-range aligned lamellar layers composed of hollow spheres, was fabricated applying a facile bidirectional freezing method. Due such structure, the as-prepared displays low conductivity across compressive strength along layers. Additionally,...

Composite phase change materials (PCMs) consisting of thermally conductive nanofillers and a PCM matrix can provide an effective buffer for battery packs to avoid thermal runaway. However, there remain some challenges overcome the trade-off between conductivity enthalpy. Herein, we developed bidirectionally high composite featuring radially oriented structure using arrayed radial freezing method. The advanced achieves (6.09 W m–1 K–1) axial conductivities (4.83 while maintaining transition...

Porous nanostructured FeCl₃ was used as template and oxidant simultaneously to synthesize films of conducting polymers their composites.

With assistance of surfactants, self-assembled Polypyrrole (PPy) film was prepared via oil / water interfacial polymerization. The chemical structure and morphologies the obtained samples have been characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), respectively. electrochemical performance recorded on an workstation, mainly includes cyclic voltammetry (CV) tests. PPy has its own extremely vesicular structures from results indicates using different...

Biomimetic learning has boosted the development of layered nanocomposites with superior mechanical properties, fast ion conduction, high barrier capacities, and conductivities, resulting in numerous practical applications artificial structural materials, energy storage, filtration, electromagnetic shielding. These outstanding properties result from highly oriented structure. Convenient fabrication complex shapes are required for applications. However, conventional strategies, including ice...

Epoxy cellular plastics have been widely used in lightweight transportation vehicles and energy-efficient constructions due to their low density, excellent mechanical properties, corrosion resistance. However, it remains a great challenge develop well-defined porous structure conventional epoxy foam thereby enhance thermal properties the competition between heating thermosetting of resins during foaming processes. Herein, inspired by wood, we report type wood-mimetic plastic with...