A scalable hydrogel processing route to high-strength, foldable clay-based artificial nacre

Abstract Manipulating the nanofiber building block within nacre-inspired materials provides a great and partly unforeseen opportunities to prepare strong, tough functional nanocomposites. In this work, we demonstrate a scalable hydrogel processing route to organize aramid nanofiber for improving the mechanical property of clay-based nacre-mimetics. High-strength, foldable clay-based artificial nacre containing aramid nanofiber and poly(vinyl alcohol) is fabricated by a continuous gelation-crosslinking-stretching route. Such route results in a well-organized layered composite structure that aramid nanofibers are closely entangled, well oriented and tightly adhere to the co-oriented nanoclay by crosslinked poly(vinyl alcohol). As a result, the clay-based artificial nacre exhibits high strength (496.6 ± 20 MPa), outstanding toughness (13.6 ± 1.0 MJ/m3), remarkable retention (≈85%) of mechanical property after folding for 100 cycles, good transparency and almost complete blocking of UV light (99.85%).