The Advanced Civil Engineering - Materials Research Lab at the University of Michigan has shown that it is possible to make concrete more bendable without fracturing. The UMich team borrowed ideas from mother-of-pearl (nacre), found on the inside of abalone seashells.
At the nanoscale, mother-of-pearl looks like a brick wall made from thin layers of aragonite (natural calcium carbonate) platelets with a “mortar” between them of a very elastic natural polymer. The UMich team mimicked this structure to invent a ductile concrete, engineered cementitious composite (ECC) which has 300 to 500 times more tensile strain capacity than normal concrete.
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