Bio-inspired laminar flow control enables the fabrication of highly aligned graphene nanocomposites with enhanced mechanical and tribological performance through high-precision digital light processing.

Authors

Hefeng Zhang, Dong Liang, Jigang Feng, Caizhe Xu, Yu Song, Feng Lin, Jun Zhao

Published in

Materials horizons. Aug 14, 2026. Epub Aug 14, 2026.

Abstract

Inspired by the nacre-like "brick-and-mortar" architecture characterized by the orderly arrangement of hard platelets within a soft matrix, this study presents a novel approach to fabricating graphene nanosheet-reinforced composites. These composites feature a highly oriented and uniformly distributed arrangement within a resin matrix, achieved via a high-precision digital light processing (DLP) method. Computational simulations of laminar flow dynamics within graphene nanosheet-reinforced resin were conducted to establish optimal platform control parameters. Mechanical testing results demonstrate significant improvements in both tensile and flexural properties across four different photosensitive resins (MED, RG, BIO, and HTL), with tensile strength increase exceeding 50% in all compositions. In addition, the tribological performance of the resins is significantly enhanced by the incorporation of highly oriented graphene. Notably, the MED resin exhibited excellent tribological performance, with the coefficient of friction (COF) reduced from 0.63 to 0.024 (a 96.2% reduction) and the wear volume decreased by 98.8%, placing this improvement among the leading results reported for carbon-based reinforcement strategies in 3D-printed tribological applications. Furthermore, by employing focused ion beam (FIB) planar ion bombardment to progressively remove the surface resin matrix, the graphene nanosheets originally embedded beneath the surface are exposed, enabling visualization of their spatial distribution. Thus, this approach provides a universal and generalizable methodology for characterizing nanosheet orientation arrangement in reinforced composite materials. The developed nacre-inspired "brick-and-mortar" structured composite with integrated strength, toughness, and wear resistance has great promise for applications in high-tech fields such as biomanufacturing, aerospace, and robotics, demonstrating broad application prospects.

PMID:
42598965
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 14 Aug 2026.

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