Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA.
Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Nat Mater. 2015 Jan;14(1):23-36. doi: 10.1038/nmat4089. Epub 2014 Oct 26.
Natural structural materials are built at ambient temperature from a fairly limited selection of components. They usually comprise hard and soft phases arranged in complex hierarchical architectures, with characteristic dimensions spanning from the nanoscale to the macroscale. The resulting materials are lightweight and often display unique combinations of strength and toughness, but have proven difficult to mimic synthetically. Here, we review the common design motifs of a range of natural structural materials, and discuss the difficulties associated with the design and fabrication of synthetic structures that mimic the structural and mechanical characteristics of their natural counterparts.
天然结构材料是在环境温度下由相当有限的组件构建而成的。它们通常由硬相与软相组成，以复杂的层次结构排列，特征尺寸从纳米尺度到宏观尺度不等。由此产生的材料重量轻，通常具有强度和韧性的独特组合，但在合成方面一直难以模仿。在这里，我们回顾了一系列天然结构材料的常见设计主题，并讨论了设计和制造模仿天然结构的结构和机械特性的合成结构所面临的困难。
