New discovery in animal exoskeletons leads to advances in designing construction materials

A new design motif derived from the rigid external covering of invertebrates may help create more damage tolerant materials for future building and construction.

The new pattern can add a high strength to commonly used building materials such as cement and composites, according to a paper published in Nature Communications.

The cement industry is one of the largest producers of carbon dioxide and this discovery will assist in reducing the use of cement by improving the material's damage tolerance.

One of the most consumed construction materials in the world is cement. They used a 3D printing technique combined with artificial intelligence to fabricate a lightweight cement composite which was shown to have a superior load-bearing capacity and a progressive failure pattern.

We demonstrated the application of this design motif in producing a high strength, damage tolerant lightweight cement material. In addition, this design motif can be applied to various materials such as ceramic, glass, polymeric and metallic materials for advanced materials design, energy storage /conversion and architectural structures, in collaboration with the teams from University ofQueensland and University of Manchester.

Since the discovery of the helical structure in 1972 there has been a drive to extract design motifs from more than 7 million living species in the world to aid the fabrication of structured/structural materials.

Only eight categories of design motifs have ever been used in materials design, but after almost 50 years of research, remarkable repetition has been confirmed in most classes of species.

The design structure has been found in arthropods, legs of mammals, and lizards. These design motifs are useful sources of inspiration for modern materials design.

The energy dissipated by segment rotation is comparable to the current design motif. The material can exhibit a unique periodic progressive failure behavior. The rest of the structure can still maintain the integrity and most of the load-bearing capacity, but we can contain the damage within a particular region of material.

More information: Wei Wang et al, Damage-tolerant material design motif derived from asymmetrical rotation, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28991-5 Journal information: Nature Communications Citation: New discovery in animal exoskeletons leads to advances in designing construction materials (2022, April 7) retrieved 7 April 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-04-discovery-animal-exoskeletons-advances-materials.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.