Mechanics of Bioderived-Cellulose-Based Ultra-Strong and Ultra-Tough Materials

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This research program will focus on exploring design strategies to achieve ultra-strong and ultra-tough materials based on bioderived cellulose. Cellulose is the most abundant biopolymer on Earth and has long been used to produce paper products. Cellulose has remarkable mechanical properties, making it as a promising building block for high performance functional and structural materials. While plants are the common source of cellulose, it requires extra physical and chemical processing to isolate and purify cellulose from plants, and such processing can potentially decrease the mechanical performance of plant cellulose. Moreover, trees often take years or decades to mature, posing substantial time cost to plant cellulose. Bioderived Cellulose produced through a microscopic organism enabled fermentation process is chemically 100% pure with much better properties than plant cellulose and can be obtained at industrial scale at a low cost within days. This research program aims to use both experimental and computational studies to investigate the fundamental science that governs the superb mechanical properties of bioderived cellulose. The success of this research program can potentially lead to a low-cost and long-sought solution in designing high performance engineering materials. The research will also be complemented by establishing a well-rounded educational and outreach program including research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, internship for underrepresented minority high school students, public outreach at the annual Maryland Day, and research dissemination via cyberinfrastructure. The specific goal of this research program is (a) to explore a promising but largely unexplored strategy to enhance the mechanical properties of bioderived cellulose materials via ion infiltration, and (b) to decipher the fundamental correlation of the superb mechanical properties of bioderived cellulose materials with cellulose fiber length/alignment and water content. The research will be conducted via a coherent research framework integrating experiments and multiscale modeling. By revealing the fundamental science of the superb intrinsic mechanical properties of cellulose, the project holds promise to drive a paradigm shift in the usage of cellulose beyond its conventional way. The new knowledge generated from this research program will shed light fertile opportunities to exploit the full potential of the intrinsic superb mechanical properties of cellulose, the most abundant biopolymer on Earth. The fundamental scientific understanding emerging from this study can enrich the disciplines of mechanics of materials with multiple tantalizing research frontiers and be readily adapted and generalized to other material systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.