A new biomimetic composite structure with tunable stiffness and superior toughness via designed structure breakage

Abstract

Mimicking natural structures has been highly pursued recently in composite structure design to break the bottlenecks in the mechanical properties of the traditional structures. Bone has a remarkable comprehensive performance of strength, stiffness and toughness, due to the intricate hierarchical microstructures and the sacrificial bonds within the organic components. Inspired by the strengthening and toughening mechanisms of cortical bone, a new biomimetic composite structure, with a designed progressive breakable internal construction mimicking the sacrificial bond, is proposed in this paper. Combining the bio-composite staggered plate structure with the sacrificial bond-mimicking construction, our new structure can realize tunable stiffness and superior toughness. We established the constitutive model of the representative unit cell of our new structure, and investigated its mechanical properties through theoretical analysis, as well as finite element modeling (FEM) and simulation. Two theoretical relations, respectively describing the elastic modulus decline ratio and the unit cell toughness promotion, are derived as functions of the geometrical parameters and the material parameters, and validated by simulation. We hope that this work can lay the foundation for the stiffness tunable and high toughness biomimetic composite structure design, and provide new ideas for the development of sacrificial bond-mimicking strategies in bio-inspired composite structures.