Breaking the Trade-Off: An All-in-One Strategy for Nacre-Inspired, Damage-Tolerant SiC Ceramics With Shape...

Ceramics owe their unrivalled thermal-chemical stability due to strong directional covalent bonding. However, it condemns them to sudden, catastrophic, and defect-triggered fractures. Bio-templating has emerged as a promising route to reconcile strength with toughness, and nacre's brick-and-mortar (B&M) architecture is repeatedly invoked as the paragon for energy-dissipating and damage-tolerant design. Realizing such a framework in ceramics remains a challenge, as layer-by-layer targeted assembly, mimicking natural construction, requires stringent process control, thereby eliminating cost efficiency. Polymer-derived ceramics (PDCs) realize outstanding designability. However, the 20%-30% linear shrinkage triggered by calcination obliterates precision geometry. In the face of this conflict, we present a nacre-inspired, homogeneous silicon carbide (SiC)- reinforced ceramic composite with a polymethyl methacrylate coating, which enhances both shape preservation and damage tolerance. The obtained SiC ceramic scaffold with SiC whisker reinforcement retains the most satisfying layer structure. Excellent shape preservation was achieved with only 7.76% line shrinkage. After grafting the scaffold surface with KH-570 silane, the scaffold is more readily immersed in methyl methacrylate, yielding a ceramic-polymer hybrid. A strain of 0.429% was observed during the tensile test, accompanied by pseudo-ductility, resulting from multistep energy dissipation and achieving satisfactory damage tolerance.