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Recently, it has been found experimentally that hydrated nacre exhibits anonlinear mechanical response. While mechanical nonlinearity has been shown tobe important in other biological structures, such as spider webs, theimplications of mechanical nonlinearity in nacre have not been explored. Here,we show that the nonlinear mechanical response of nacre can be reproduced by ananalytical model, which reflects a nacre-like layered structure, consisting oflinear-elastic hard sheets glued together by weakly nonlinear-elastic softsheets. We develop scaling analysis on this analytical model, and performnumerical simulations using a lattice model, which is a discrete counterpart ofthe analytical model. Unexpectedly, we find the weak nonlinearity in the softcomponent significantly contributes to enhancing toughness by redistributingthe stress at a crack tip over a wider area. Beyond demonstrating a mechanismthat explains the unusual properties of biological nacre, this study points toa general design principle for constructing tough composites using weaknonlinearity, and is useful as a guiding principle to develop artificiallayered structures mimicking nacre.

Toughening in a nacre-like soft-hard layered structure due to weak nonlinearity in the soft layer