Bioinspired architectures are effective in enhancing the mechanical properties of materials, yet are difficult to construct in metallic systems. The structure-property relationships of bioinspired metallic composites also remain unclear. Here, Mg-Ti composites were fabricated by pressureless infiltrating pure Mg melt into three-dimensional (3-D) printed Ti-6Al-4V scaffolds. The result was composite materials where the constituents are continuous, mutually interpenetrated in 3-D space and exhibit specific spatial arrangements with bioinspired brick-and-mortar, Bouligand, and crossed-lamellar architectures. These architectures promote effective stress transfer, delocalize damage and arrest cracking, thereby bestowing improved strength and ductility than composites with discrete reinforcements. Additionally, they activate a series of extrinsic toughening mechanisms, including crack deflection/twist and uncracked-ligament bridging, which enable crack-tip shielding from the applied stress and lead to “Γ”-shaped rising fracture resistance R-curves. Quantitative relationships were established for the stiffness and strengths of the composites by adapting classical laminate theory to incorporate their architectural characteristics.

Recently developed advanced high-strength materials like metallic glasses, nanocrystalline metallic materials, and advanced ceramics usually fracture in a catastrophic brittle manner, which makes it quite essential to find a reasonable fracture criterion to predict their brittle failure behaviors. Based on the analysis of substantial experimental observations of fracture behaviors of metallic glasses and other high-strength materials, here we developed a new fracture criterion and proved it effective in predicting the critical fracture conditions under complex stress states. The new criterion is not only a unified one which unifies the three classical failure criteria, i.e., the maximum normal stress criterion, the Tresca criterion and the Mohr-Coulomb criterion, but also a universal criterion which has the ability to describe the fracture mechanisms of a variety of different high-strength materials under various external loading conditions.

Discovering a generalized criterion that can predict the mechanical failure of various different structural materials is one of ultimate goals for scientists in both material and mechanics communities. Since the first study on the failure criterion of materials by Galileo, about three centuries have passed. Now we eventually find the “generalized energy criterion”, as presented here, which appears to be one universal law for various different kinds of materials. The validity of the energy criterion for quantitatively predicting the failure is experimentally confirmed using a metallic glass. The generalized energy criterion reveals the competition and interaction between shear and cleavage, the two fundamental inherent failure mechanisms, and thus provides new physical insights into the failure prediction of materials and structural components.