Nacre-inspired brick wall rolled into a concentric rod (IMAGE)
Caption
The images show how a nacre-inspired composite is built like a rolled-up “brick wall”. Hard ceramic platelets (the bricks) and a soft polymer (the mortar) are arranged in concentric layers around the rod’s axis. Because the layers curve around the center, the weak directions between them point in every radial direction and never line up into one continuous weak plane, as they do in a conventional flat laminate. The bottom panels show the real material: a cross-section view of the rolled layers (left) and, seen at higher magnification, the platelets aligned along the curved layers (right).
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©Science China Press
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