The ideal material should be mechanically strong and reliable but ultralight. Nature achieves this with ease, combining soft, light materials in periodic arrangements like bricks and mortar to create composite materials with improved strength, stiffness, and toughness. It has proved trickier, however, to mimic nature’s cleverness with materials in the lab.
Now, a team of US and Chinese researchers led by Gary J. Cheng at Purdue University believes has come up with a strategy to overcome the ‘rule of mixtures’ and create ultralight, mechanically reliable composite materials [Deng et al., Materials Today (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mattod.2018.03.027].
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