Materials with three-dimensional micro- and nanoarchitectures exhibit many beneficial mechanical, energy conversion and optical properties. However, these three-dimensional microarchitectures are significantly limited by their scalability. Efforts have only been successful only in demonstrating overall structure sizes of hundreds of micrometres, or contain size-scale gaps of several orders of magnitude. This results in degraded mechanical properties at the macroscale. Here we demonstrate hierarchical metamaterials with disparate three-dimensional features spanning seven orders of magnitude, from nanometres to centimetres. At the macroscale they achieve high tensile elasticity (>20%) not found in their brittle-like metallic constituents, and a near-constant specific strength. Creation of these materials is enabled by a high-resolution, large-area additive manufacturing technique with scalability not achievable by two-photon polymerization or traditional stereolithography. With overall part sizes approaching tens of centimetres, these unique nanostructured metamaterials might find use in a broad array of applications.

Ceramics are an important class of materials with widespread applications because of their high thermal, mechanical, and chemical stability. Computational predictions based on first principles methods can be a valuable tool in accelerating materials discovery to develop improved ceramics. It is essential to experimentally confirm the material properties of such predictions. However, materials screening rates are limited by the long processing times and the poor compositional control from volatile element loss in conventional ceramic sintering techniques. To overcome these limitations, we developed an ultrafast high-temperature sintering (UHS) process for the fabrication of ceramic materials by radiative heating under an inert atmosphere. We provide several examples of the UHS process to demonstrate its potential utility and applications, including advancements in solid-state electrolytes, multicomponent structures, and high-throughput materials screening.

No abstract

No abstract