A high toughness and light weight armor structure bioinspired design based on a bovine hoof wall

[Display omitted] •Mechanical properties and microstructure of the bovine hoof wall have been studied.•A kind of special structural model has been proposed.•Three dimension printing technology has been used to fabricate the model.•This structural model has a high potential to improve the mechanical properties of materials. Mechanical properties and microstructure of the bovine hoof wall have been studied. The reduced modulus and hardness of the transverse and the longitudinal specimens decrease from the outside to the inside, and reach a peak of 4.69 GPa and 0.15 GPa, respectively. The further work reveals that the enhancement mechanism is the lamellar structure and fiber-refined mode. In addition, a kind of structural model is designed and fabricated by three-dimensional printing technology, whose performance is improved by 55%. We hope this work can provide ideas for a new high-toughness and light-weight armor design.