Plastic Deformation Enabled Energy Dissipation in a Bionanowire Structured Armor

It has been challenging to simultaneously achieve high strength and toughness in engineered materials because of the trade-off relation between the two distinct properties. Nature, however, has elegantly solved this problem. Seashells, commonly referred to as nature’s armors, exhibit an unusual resilience against predatory attacks. In this letter, we report an unexpected phenomenon in a bionanowire structured armor–conch shell where the shell’s basic building blocks, i.e., the third-order lamellae, exhibit an exceptional plasticity with a maximum strain of 0.7% upon mechanical loading. We attribute such a plastic deformation behavior to the lamella’s unique nanoparticle–biopolymer architecture, in which the biopolymer mediates the rotation of aragonite nanoparticles in response to external attacks. We also found that electron beam irradiation facilitates the lamella’s plasticity. These findings advance our understanding of seashell’s energy dissipating strategy and provide new design guidelines for developing high performance bioinspired materials and sensors.