Work

Tough, thermal insulating and scalable puff pastry-inspired architected cementitious material via simple rolling-folding

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Architected material design enables cementitious materials to achieve highly desirable mechanical and functional performance for next-generation infrastructure. However, current architected cementitious materials require complex and energy-intensive fabrication, limiting their scalability and large-scale implementation. Inspired by the preparation of puff pastry, we propose a lamellar cementitious architected material fabricated by a simple rolling-folding process under ambient conditions. This material features a highly ordered lamellar architecture, consisting of alternating parallel cement lamellae and discrete plate-like cavities. This structure enables ductile fracture behavior, high fracture toughness, and effective thermal insulation. The specific fracture toughness of this material reaches up to 91 MPa·mm 0.5 /g·cm 3 , approximately 20 times higher than that of the cast counterpart, surpassing conventional reinforced cementitious composites and approaching the level of certain polymers. Meanwhile, its thermal conductivity decreases to 0.38 W/m·K, representing a 68.3% reduction relative to the cast counterpart, and outperforming lightweight cementitious materials with comparable densities. Furthermore, this material demonstrates good manufacturing efficiency, scalability, and geometric adaptability, overcoming the application limitations of existing architected cementitious materials. This study can help advance the development of next-generation infrastructure materials.

Source: Nature Communications

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-77120-z