Fig. 6: Cracking morphologies and toughening mechanisms in the bioinspired Mg-Ti composites.

SEM images and CT volume renderings of the quasi-static fracture toughness samples for the composites with bioinspired (a) brick-and-mortar, (b) Bouligand, and (c) crossed-lamellar architectures. The CT images were processed by filtering out the signals of constituents and highlighting the cracking regions. The white arrows in (b) indicate the microcracks ahead of the crack tip. The inset in (c) magnifies the zig-zag cracking path and the resulted frictional sliding between crack faces as indicated by the arrows.