Structural Design of Tough Porous Materials: From Natural to Biomimetic

ABSTRACT Porous materials have garnered extensive interest for applications in catalysis, energy storage, and biomedicine. However, there is a general difficulty that higher porosity typically leads to lower mechanical strength. Natural porous structures, developed and evolved in complex environments, exhibit remarkable mechanical properties and multifunctionality, offering crucial inspiration for developing strong and tough functional porous materials. In this paper, some representative structures of natural porous materials are taken as examples, and they are grouped and discussed from the perspectives of structural characteristics and mechanical design, aiming to refine the general principles of mechanical robustness of porous materials. Based on these design principles, manufacturing strategies for bioinspired strong and tough porous materials are summarized. Finally, recent advances in the application of biomimetic tough porous materials in the fields of energy absorption, bone tissue engineering, and energy/sensing are explored. By mimicking the natural multi‐scale porous structure, it is possible to make synthetic porous materials with both comprehensive mechanical properties and multifunctionality, which brings a new direction for the development of porous materials.