Synergistic effect of graphene oxide/montmorillonite-sodium carboxymethycellulose ternary mimic-nacre nanocomposites prepared via a facile evaporation and hot- pressing technique

[Display omitted] •Ternary enhanced bionic structure prepared from cellulose derivative, MMT and GO exhibited excellent mechanical and barrier properties.•Hot-pressing technique used for encouraging densed layered structure.•Under hot-pressing, GO nanosheets not only interact with organic matter through hydrogen bonds, but also with MMT through chemical crosslinking.•GO served as crosslinker.•The synergistic effect between ternary component with hot-pressing. Montmorillonite (MMT) and graphene oxide (GO), as important building block materials, are becoming hot candidates to construct biomimetic hierarchical structure materials. In this work, we fabricated integrated strong and stiff cellulosed-based nanocomposites via a simple water-solution evaporation and hot-pressing technique. It is found there are synergistic effect among the MMT, GO and carboxymethycellulose-Na (CMC-Na) under hot-pressing. Interestingly, it is also proved that there is chemical crosslinking between MMT and GO except hydrogen bonds under our experiment condition. The tensile strength and toughness of graphene oxide/montmorillonite-sodium carboxymethycellulose (GO/MMT-CMC) hybrid films reach up to 320.11 ± 12.22 MPa and 7.79 ± 1.78 MJ/m3, respectively, which were about 2.37 and 4.33 times higher than that of pure nacre; In addition, the artificial composites show excellent oxygen gas barrier and flame resistance properties. When the GO content is about 1.4 wt%, the oxygen permeability of GO/MMT-CMC is 0.94 × 10−12 cm³·cm/cm2·s·cmHg, which is 50.79% lower than that of pure CMC films. Meanwhile, the GO/MMT-CMC ternary nanopapers demonstrate excellent self-extinguishing performance which attract interest in fire-shielding coating.