title: Water-responsive rapid recovery of natural cellular material.
abstract: Insight into the stimuli-responsive behaviour of biological materials with hierarchical microstructures is essential for designing new sustainable materials and structures. Shape memory, self-healing and self-repairing will become valuable characteristics of advanced materials. Here we report the water-triggered shape recovery of a natural biological material, the luffa sponge. The longitudinally crushed luffa sponge column can recover up to 98% of its original shape after it is immersed in water. The mechanical properties of the luffa sponge can also be recovered, to a large extent, after a subsequent drying process. The effects of strain rate, crushing strains, loading cycles, and temperature/duration of water treatment of the drying process on the shape recovery ratio and the energy dissipation recovery ratio have been investigated. The results from this study have demonstrated that the luffa sponge material possesses remarkable shape memory effects and mechanical recovery features which could be exploited or biomimicked for the design of water-responsive smart materials undergoing large deformations.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Innovative Structures and Materials, School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne 3001, Australia.
authors.forename: Jianhu
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.affiliation: Centre for Innovative Structures and Materials, School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne 3001, Australia. Electronic address: mike.xie@rmit.edu.au.
authors.forename: Yi Min
authors.initials: YM
authors.lastname: Xie
authors.affiliation: Centre for Innovative Structures and Materials, School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne 3001, Australia.
authors.forename: Shiwei
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: Centre for Innovative Structures and Materials, School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne 3001, Australia.
authors.forename: Xiaodong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Engineering and Industrial Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, John Street, Hawthorn VIC 3122, Australia.
authors.forename: Dong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ruan
mesh_terms: D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena / Q000187:drug effects; D029776:Luffa / Q000166:cytology / Q000187:drug effects*; D055595:Mechanical Phenomena; D013997:Time Factors; D014867:Water / Q000494:pharmacology*
chemical_list: D014867:Water
keywords: Composite materials; Microstructures; Porous materials; Stimuli–responsive materials