Convergent Evolution to Engineering: Multiscale Structures and Mechanics in Damage Tolerant Functional Biocomposite and Biomimetic Materials

[Under construction]
2014 AFOSR MURI
Convergent Evolution to Engineering: Multiscale Structures and Mechanics in Damage Tolerant Functional Biocomposite and Biomimetic Materials
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Website: TBD

Light-weight, energy-efficient and high-performance structural materials that exhibit both strength and toughness are highly desirable for a number of DOD applications. However, constructing materials with these mechanical properties is challenging. Nature has evolved efficient strategies, exemplified in the biological tissues of numerous animal and plant species, to synthesize and construct materials that often exhibit exceptional mechanical properties. Both plants and animals demonstrate functional structures with significant mechanical performance.

Decades of research have been spent investigating multiple biological organisms, uncovering aspects of design features that enhance toughness as well as other properties. There are still important gaps to fully understand the fundamental mechanical behavior that yields extraordinary performance of these materials under critical loading conditions. Thus, a concerted effort to reduce complexity of these systems and establish rules to enable the predictable design of light-weight materials, which are tough and strong, needs to be implemented.

We propose to develop basic scientific foundations for these predictable designs by taking advantage of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary changes of tough and strong structures in both plant and animal species. This will be achieved through a multidisciplinary approach that involves the utilization of materials science, mechanics, and biology, coupled with multiscale modeling and insights from evolutionary pressures. This hypothesis-driven integrated approach will utilize ultrastructural and mechanical experiments at a variety of length-scales, biomimetics and multiscale computational modeling to unravel the physical mechanisms that underpin the micro- and nanomechanics of these materials that yield tough and strong structures. This will transform and revolutionize DOD capabilities by enabling the fabrication of predictive structures which will not only be light-weight, tough and strong, but also incorporate multifunctionality including self-healing, sensing and beyond. Finally, we will also refine and organize experimental characterization, nanomechanical testing and biomimetics methods into toolkits, which will have broad utility for a number of DOD programs.