Toughening natural rubber by the innate sacrificial network

Although natural rubber (NR) is widely used in rubber industry, the reason why NR owns superior mechanical properties still remains as an open question. Previous studies mainly focus on the molecular chain structure investigation of NR (for example, highly cis stereoregularity) and neglect the importance of non-rubber components (NRC) to strength and toughness. Herein, we use transmission electron microscopy to clearly observe the network...