Nature has spent millions of years perfecting the art of protection. Seashells, bones, and feathers all exhibit remarkable resilience to mechanical stress through carefully layered structures. Now, engineers have tapped into this biological blueprint, developing programmable synthetic materials that mimic the adaptive behaviors of natural layers.
Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Technical University of Denmark have created multilayered materials that work together, like nacre, the mother-of-pearl found in seashells. This innovation is poised to enhance wearable bandages, car bumpers, and shock-absorbing systems, intelligently adjusting their responses based on the severity of an impact.
While past studies have focused on reverse engineering biological materials, professors Shelly Zhang and Ole Sigmund took a different approach, moving beyond simple replication to program synthetic layers at the microscale.
“There’s always a physical limit to what a single material can achieve, even with programming,” Zhang explains. “We wondered—what if multiple layers could collaborate, like the layers in a seashell?”
The result is a material framework in which individual layers exhibit unique properties but also communicate and behave as one, optimizing their response to external forces.
In theory, designing materials is one thing—fabricating them is another. The researchers envisioned an infinitely periodic material, but real-world constraints required practical adjustments. Interestingly, these discrepancies turned out to be an advantage.
“We learned to program the buckling sequence of individual layers intentionally,” Zhang says. “This allows us to store and later decode physical information—a phenomenon that could open doors to new applications.”
Scaling up this material remains challenging, but the researchers envision a future where collaborative materials transform safety gear, structural design, and even bio-inspired electronics.
“If materials can work together the way people do, their impact could be far greater than anything we’ve seen before,” Zhang says.
Journal Reference:
- Zhi Zhao, Rahul Kundu, et al. Extreme nonlinearity by layered materials through inverse design. Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr6925
