Engineering Commons^™

Magnetically Assisted Assembly Of Bioinspired Composites, Tobias Niebel, Hortense Le Ferrand, Florian Bouville, André Studart

Composites at Lake Louise (CALL 2015)

Heterogeneous composites with intricate microstructures can be found widely in nature fulfilling the functional demands imposed by their environment. Reaching this level of intricacy in synthetic composites remains a challenge due to the lack of suitable and easily available processing tools. We present a new method to produce bioinspired composites with a broad variety of locally controlled composition, texture and shape using low magnetic fields. Nacre-like all-ceramic, polymer-ceramic and metal-ceramic composites with volume fractions of ceramic phase spanning from 40 to values as high as 95 vol% are achieved. By mixing magnetically responsive alumina microplatelets with ceramic nanoparticles, we can …