Nanoscale toughening mechanism of nacre tablet

Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials
Ning ZhangYouping Chen

Abstract

Nacre has attracted widespread interest because its unique hierarchical structure, which is assembled by 95 wt% brittle aragonite and 5 wt% soft organic materials, leads to several orders of improvement in fracture toughness. Apart from the well proposed toughening mechanisms such as mineral bridges and tablets interlocks, the organic materials including biopolymers between tablets and proteins exist within a tablet can also potentially improve the toughness. In this work, we employ a novel approach combining steered molecular dynamics (SMD) and classical molecular dynamics (MD) to build a model of mineral-protein composite to mimic nacre tablet. The critical role of protein in improving the fracture toughness of nacre is investigated for the first time. MD simulations of single crystalline aragonite, polycrystalline aragonite and mineral-protein composite under uniaxial tensile loading are performed, and the obtained constitutive responses are compared with experimental measurements of nacre under tension. It is shown that the fracture toughness of mineral-protein composite is significantly larger than that of single crystalline or polycrystalline aragonite. Detailed atomic configuration analyses reveal that the fracture of in...Continue Reading

References

Dec 8, 2005·Spectrochimica Acta. Part A, Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy·Devendra VermaDinesh Katti
Oct 13, 2006·Nano Letters·Xiaodong LiRizhi Wang
Feb 23, 2008·Science·Christine Ortiz, Mary C Boyce
Jan 1, 2008·Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials·Marc André MeyersJulie Muyco
May 14, 2011·Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials·Marc A MeyersAlbert Y M Lin
Aug 1, 2012·Materials Science & Engineering. C, Materials for Biological Applications·Ning Zhang, Youping Chen

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Citations

Oct 28, 2020·Materials·Johannes StögererJürgen Stampfl
Jun 20, 2020·ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces·Jabir UbaidS Kumar

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