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Hidden energy dissipation mechanism in nacre

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Abstract

The defense mechanism that nacre (mother-of-pearl) uses to protect its living organism against high-speed predatory attack can provide lessons for engineered armor design. However, the underlying physics responsible for nacre’s dynamic energy dissipation has hitherto remained a mystery to be uncovered. Here we demonstrate a new energy dissipation mechanism hidden in nacre and activated only upon dynamic loading, where the crack terminates its propagation along nacre’s biopolymer interlayers but straightly impinges the aragonite platelets (95 vol%) in a transgranular manner. This intergranular-transgranular transition promotes the fracture energy dissipation, far exceeding that of the currently-used engineered ceramics. The mechanistic origin accounting for the enhancement of fracture energy dissipation is attributed to the unique nanoparticle architectured aragonite platelets. The dynamic manifestation in nacre can inspire a new route to design stronger-and-tougher engineered ceramic armors.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the help from D. Wilhelm for compression test. We also appreciate the help with SEM and TEM observation from Y.C. Yang and D. Blom, respectively. This work was supported by the U.S. Army research office under agreement/Grant No. W911 NF-07-1-0449. Q.M. Wei was grateful for the financial support of U.S. Army Research Office under Grant No. W911NF-07-1-0335.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, 29208, USA

    Zaiwang Huang, Haoze Li & Xiaodong Li

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, 28223, USA

    Zhiliang Pan & Qiuming Wei

  3. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, 22904, USA

    Xiaodong Li

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  1. Zaiwang Huang
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Correspondence to Qiuming Wei or Xiaodong Li.

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Huang, Z., Pan, Z., Li, H. et al. Hidden energy dissipation mechanism in nacre. Journal of Materials Research 29, 1573–1578 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2014.179

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2014.179

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