Spiral Honeycomb Microstructured Bacterial Cellulose for Increased Strength and Toughness

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Abstract

Natural materials, such as nacre and silk, exhibit both high strength and toughness due to their hierarchical structures highly organized at the nano-, micro-, and macroscales. Bacterial cellulose (BC) presents a hierarchical fibril structure at the nanoscale. At the microscale, however, BC nanofibers are distributed randomly. Here, BC self-assembles into a highly organized spiral honeycomb microstructure giving rise to a high tensile strength (315 MPa) and a high toughness value (17.8 MJ m-3), with pull-out and de-spiral morphologies observed during failure. Both experiments and finite-element simulations indicate improved mechanical properties resulting from the honeycomb structure. The mild fabrication process consists of an in situ fermentation step utilizing poly(vinyl alcohol), followed by a post-treatment including freezing-thawing and boiling. This simple self-assembly production process is highly scalable, does not require any toxic chemicals, and enables the fabrication of light, strong, and tough hierarchical composite materials with tunable shape and size.

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Yu, K., Balasubramanian, S., Pahlavani, H., Mirzaali, M. J., Zadpoor, A. A., & Aubin-Tam, M. E. (2020). Spiral Honeycomb Microstructured Bacterial Cellulose for Increased Strength and Toughness. ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, 12(45), 50748–50755. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.0c15886

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