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 constructed by NRC in the NR matrix. Such network is considered as an innate sacrificial network. Upon deformation, the innate sacrificial network preferentially ruptures to dissipate energy, leading to improvement in toughness of NR. Moreover, some NRC can act as the crosslinking points in the NR matrix, which further improve the strength and toughness. Therefore, our group ascribes the excellent strength and toughness of NR to the contribution of sacrificial network constructed by NRC. This work provides another understanding for the relationship among structure, components, and properties of NR, which can further act as a design strategy for high performance elastomer materials.

尽管天然橡胶（NR）在橡胶工业中被广泛使用，但是NR具有卓越机械性能的原因仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。以前的研究主要集中在天然橡胶的分子链结构研究中（例如，高度顺式立体规则性），而忽略了非橡胶成分（NRC）对强度和韧性的重要性。在这里，我们使用透射电子显微镜清楚地观察到由NRC在NR矩阵中构建的网络。这样的网络被认为是先天的牺牲网络。变形时，先天的牺牲网络优先破裂以耗散能量，从而提高了NR的韧性。此外，一些NRC可以作为NR基体中的交联点，从而进一步提高强度和韧性。因此，我们的小组将NR的优异强度和韧性归功于NRC构建的牺牲网络。这项工作为NR的结构，成分和特性之间的关系提供了另一种理解，