Natural nacre supplies a number of properties that can be used in designing high-performance bioinspired materials. Likewise, due to the extraordinary properties of graphene, a series of bioinspired graphene-based materials have recently been demonstrated. Compared to other approaches for constructing graphene-based materials, bioinspired concepts result in high-loading graphene, and the resultant high-performance graphene-based artificial nacres demonstrate isotropic mechanical and electrical properties. In this Perspective, we describe how to construct integrated graphene-based artificial nacre through the synergistic relationship between interface interactions and building blocks. These integrated graphene-based artificial nacres show promising applications in many fields, such as aerospace, flexible supercapacitor electrodes, artificial muscle, and tissue engineering.

Bioinspired ternary rGO–MMT–PVA nanocomposites were successfully fabricated via the synergistic toughening effect from building blocks of GO and MMT nanosheets.

Inspired by the nacre, we demonstrated the integrated ternary artificial nacre nanocomposites through synergistic toughening of graphene oxide (GO) and nanofibrillar cellulose (NFC). In addition, the covalent bonding was introduced between adjacent GO nanosheets. The synergistic toughening effects from building blocks of one-dimensional NFC and two-dimensional GO, interface interactions of hydrogen and covalent bonding together result in the integrated mechanical properties including high tensile strength, toughness, and fatigue life as well as high electrical conductivity. These extraordinary properties of the ternary synthetic nacre nanocomposites allow the support for advances in diverse strategic fields including stretchable electronics, transportation, and energy. Such bioinspired strategy also provides a new insight in designing novel multifunctional nanocomposites.

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