Many traditional approaches for strengthening steels typically come at the expense of useful ductility, a dilemma known as strength-ductility trade-off. New metallurgical processing might offer the possibility of overcoming this. Here we report that austenitic 316L stainless steels additively manufactured via a laser powder-bed-fusion technique exhibit a combination of yield strength and tensile ductility that surpasses that of conventional 316L steels. High strength is attributed to solidification-enabled cellular structures, low-angle grain boundaries, and dislocations formed during manufacturing, while high uniform elongation correlates to a steady and progressive work-hardening mechanism regulated by a hierarchically heterogeneous microstructure, with length scales spanning nearly six orders of magnitude. In addition, solute segregation along cellular walls and low-angle grain boundaries can enhance dislocation pinning and promote twinning. This work demonstrates the potential of additive manufacturing to create alloys with unique microstructures and high performance for structural applications.

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.

Digitally controlled catalyst architectures via 3D printing potentially revolutionize the design of chemical plants.

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Much progress has recently been made in the development of active materials, electrode morphologies and electrolytes for lithium ion batteries. Well-defined studies on size effects of the three-dimensional (3D) electrode architecture, however, remain to be rare due to the lack of suitable material platforms where the critical length scales (such as pore size and thickness of the active material) can be freely and deterministically adjusted over a wide range without affecting the overall 3D morphology of the electrode. Here, we report on a systematic study on length scale effects on the electrochemical performance of model 3D np-Au/TiO2 core/shell electrodes. Bulk nanoporous gold provides deterministic control over the pore size and is used as a monolithic metallic scaffold and current collector. Extremely uniform and conformal TiO2 films of controlled thickness were deposited on the current collector by employing atomic layer deposition (ALD). Our experiments demonstrate profound performance improvements by matching the Li(+) diffusivity in the electrolyte and the solid state through adjusting pore size and thickness of the active coating which, for 200 μm thick porous electrodes, requires the presence of 100 nm pores. Decreasing the thickness of the TiO2 coating generally improves the power performance of the electrode by reducing the Li(+) diffusion pathway, enhancing the Li(+) solid solubility, and minimizing the voltage drop across the electrode/electrolyte interface. With the use of the optimized electrode morphology, supercapacitor-like power performance with lithium-ion-battery energy densities was realized. Our results provide the much-needed fundamental insight for the rational design of the 3D architecture of lithium ion battery electrodes with improved power performance.