Engineers at Princeton have developed a cement composite that is 17 times more crack-resistant than traditional cement, inspired by the material that makes up oyster and abalone shells. What the team discovered was that creating alternating layers of tabulated cement paste and thin polymer greatly increases crack resistance as well as the ability to deform without completely breaking.
The composite was inspired by a natural material called nacre, or mother of pearl, which can be found inside certain shells. Nacre essentially consists of hexagonal tablets of the hard mineral aragonite glued together by a soft biopolymer if observed at the microscopic level. What you see in the images here are multi-layered small beams created by alternating cement paste sheets with thin layers of polymer.
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Our bio-inspired approach is not to simply mimic nature’s microstructure but to learn from the underlying principles and use that to inform the engineering of human-made materials. One of the key mechanisms that makes a nacreous shell tough is the sliding of the tablet at the nanometer level. Here, we focus on the mechanism of tablet sliding by engineering the built-in tabulated structure of cement paste in balance with the properties of the polymer and the interface between them.” said Reza Moini,an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton.
