Biological materials from bone to spider-silk and wood are lightweight fibre composites arranged in a complex hierarchical structure, formed by directed self-assembly to demonstrate outstanding mechanical properties. When such bioinspired stiff and lightweight materials are typically developed for applications in aircraft, automobiles and biomedical implants, their manufacture requires energy and labor-intensive fabrication processes. The manufactured materials also exhibit brittle fracture characteristics with difficulty to shape and recycle, in stark contrast to the mechanical properties of nature. Existing polymer-based lightweight structure fabrication is limited to 3-D printing, with poor mechanical strength and orientation, while highly oriented stiff polymers are restricted to construct simple geometries. In an effort to combine the freedom of structural shaping with molecular orientation, 3-D printing of liquid-crystal polymers was recently exploited. Although desirable shape-morphing effects were attained, the Young’s modulus of the soft elastomers were lower than high-performance liquid-crystal synthetic fibers due to their molecular structure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Biological materials from bone to spider-silk and wood are lightweight fibre composites arranged in a complex hierarchical structure, formed by directed self-assembly to demonstrate outstanding mechanical properties. When such bioinspired stiff and lig…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=532100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":532102,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532100\/revisions\/532102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=532100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=532100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=532100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}