Zuoqi Zhang's blog

 In spite of worldwide research, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) still have not fully realized their

 original promise as ideal reinforcements for composite materials due to a number of

 challenging issues such as weak interface, poor dispersion, misalignment and lack of optimized

 design. Here we propose a bio-inspired structure of CNT bundles with controllable

 crosslink density and staggered pattern of organization that mimic the architecture of

 natural collagen fiber. Molecular mechanics (MM) simulations show that, under tensile

 Biological materials in nature serve as a valuable source of inspiration for developing

 novel synthetic materials with extraordinary properties or functions. Much effort to date

 has been directed toward fabricating and understanding bio-inspired nanocomposites

 with internal architectures mimicking those of nacre and collagen fibril. Here we establish

 simple and explicit analytical solutions for both upper and lower bounds of the elastic

 properties of biocomposites in terms of various physical and geometrical parameters

Recent years have witnessed intense interest in multifunctional surfaces that can be designed to switch between different functional states with various external stimuli including electric field, light, pH value, and mechanical strain. The present paper is aimed to explore whether and how a surface can be designed to switch between superhydrophobicity and superhydrophilicity by an applied strain.

We investigate bending behaviors of graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) induced by surface adsorption of hydrogen atoms or molecules. At low adsorption coverage, it is shown that the chemical adsorption of hydrogen atoms causes a GNR to bend away from the adsorbed atoms while the physical adsorption of hydrogen molecules causes it to bend toward the adsorbed molecules. Interestingly, these trends are reversed at high adsorption coverage.

Load-bearing biological materials such as shell, mineralized tendon and bone exhibit 2-7 levels of structural hierarchy based on constituent materials (biominerals and proteins) of relatively poor mechanical properties. A key question that remains unanswered is what determines the number of hierarchical levels in these materials. Here we develop a quasi-self-similar hierarchical model to show that,

Unidirectional nanocomposite structures with parallel staggered platelet reinforcements are widely observed in natural biological materials. Our recent paper, published in J. Mech. Phys. Solids, is aimed at an investigation of the stiffness, strength, failure strain and energy storage capacity of a unidirectional nanocomposite with non-uniformly or randomly staggered platelet distribution.