Elastic Bounds of Bioinspired Nanocomposites

Abstract

Biological materials in nature serve as a valuable source of inspiration for developing novel synthetic materials with extraordinary properties or functions. Much effort to date has been directed toward fabricating and understanding bioinspired nanocomposites with internal architectures mimicking those of nacre and collagen fibril. Here we establish simple and explicit analytical solutions for both upper and lower bounds of the elastic properties of biocomposites in terms of various physical and geometrical parameters including volume fraction and moduli of constituents, and aspect ratio and alignment pattern of stiff reinforcements. Numerical analyses based on the finite element method are performed to validate the derived elastic bounds.