Damage of materials is difficult to avoid over their long course of service lifetime. Especially when these materials are used in protective devices, impact protection becomes an important concern to be focused on. Inspired by the bottom-up fabrication and energy dissipation mechanism of natural organisms, we here provide an optional solution for the preparation of high-performance structure for protective materials. We fabricated a photo-curing coating, comprising of microphase-separated structure into a hierarchical cross-linked architecture with surface self-wrinkled morphology, that exhibited mechanical enhanced properties comparing with the plane coating by UV photo-curing technique. Comparing with the maximum impact resistance height (hmax =70 cm) of the pure glass substrate, the hmax increased to 180 cm (~1.6 × increase) for the glass plate protected with the thickness (t) as 300 μm wrinkled hierarchical coating. The hmax of the wrinkled coating with hierarchical structure is 50% higher than that of the plane coating. For pure coating film, the young’s modulus and fracture stress of the wrinkled hierarchical coating film (t =100 μm) improved from 39.5 MPa and 2.4 MPa to 235.0 MPa (~5 × increase) and 18.5 MPa (~6.6 × increase) in comparison with the plane coating film. The wrinkled hierarchical coating exhibited excellent self-recovery behavior with heated for 2h at 70 oC after abrasion. The photo-curing process, a kind of bottom-up strategy, is conducted in a non-contact mode for materials preparation in bulk comparing with the nano-printing and lithography in engineering manufacture. Moreover, we have simulated the internal mechanism during the surface wrinkle generation and the stress distribution inside the coating under impacting, providing a promising option for biomimetic protective materials design in theoretically and experimentally.

Mechanical-enhanced photo-curing gradient coating with self-wrinkle

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