Mortise-and-tenon like van der Waals joints for strong and tough materials via multi-flow microfluidics

The construction of anisotropic structures from their anisotropic building blocks across multiple length scales usually leads to unique properties of materials, such as nanowires and nanofilaments. However, two-dimensional nanosheets with distinct anisotropic topology are scarcely employed to engineer diverse anisotropic materials with desirable properties. Here, we report anisotropy-tailored graphene nanosheets with periodic arrangement in three-dimensional space, produced by multi-flow microfluidics. Upon film densification, a classical Chinese mortise-and-tenon like van der Waals joint architecture forms from such anisotropic-tailored graphene nanosheets, enabling the resulting material to achieve a tensile strength of 2.11 gigapascals and an exceptional toughness of 87.44 megajoules per cubic meter. This philosophy of the multi-flow microfluidics controlling anisotropy-tailored graphene nanosheets and the mortise-and-tenon joint model should find use in the designing of structural materials.