Ultralight (<10 milligrams per cubic centimeter) cellular materials are desirable for thermal insulation; battery electrodes; catalyst supports; and acoustic, vibration, or shock energy damping. We present ultralight materials based on periodic hollow-tube microlattices. These materials are fabricated by starting with a template formed by self-propagating photopolymer waveguide prototyping, coating the template by electroless nickel plating, and subsequently etching away the template. The resulting metallic microlattices exhibit densities ρ ≥ 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter, complete recovery after compression exceeding 50% strain, and energy absorption similar to elastomers. Young's modulus E scales with density as E ~ ρ(2), in contrast to the E ~ ρ(3) scaling observed for ultralight aerogels and carbon nanotube foams with stochastic architecture. We attribute these properties to structural hierarchy at the nanometer, micrometer, and millimeter scales.

Ceramics have some of the highest strength- and stiffness-to-weight ratios of any material but are suboptimal for use as structural materials because of their brittleness and sensitivity to flaws. We demonstrate the creation of structural metamaterials composed of nanoscale ceramics that are simultaneously ultralight, strong, and energy-absorbing and can recover their original shape after compressions in excess of 50% strain. Hollow-tube alumina nanolattices were fabricated using two-photon lithography, atomic layer deposition, and oxygen plasma etching. Structures were made with wall thicknesses of 5 to 60 nanometers and densities of 6.3 to 258 kilograms per cubic meter. Compression experiments revealed that optimizing the wall thickness-to-radius ratio of the tubes can suppress brittle fracture in the constituent solid in favor of elastic shell buckling, resulting in ductile-like deformation and recoverability.

No abstract

No abstract

It has been known for more than half a century that crystals can be made stronger by introducing defects into them, i.e., by strain-hardening. As the number of defects increases, their movement and multiplication is impeded, thus strengthening the material. In the present work we show hardening by dislocation starvation, a fundamentally different strengthening mechanism based on the elimination of defects from the crystal. We demonstrate that submicrometer sized gold crystals can be 50 times stronger than their bulk counterparts due to the elimination of defects from the crystal in the course of deformation. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.73.245410 PACS number͑s͒: 62.25.ϩg, 81.07.Bc, 81.16.Rf, 81.70.Bt Anyone who has ever repeatedly bent a copper wire knows that it gets progressively stronger as it becomes more deformed, through a phenomenon called strain-hardening. The strengths of cold-worked metals are known to be up to ten times greater than those of well-annealed crystals. Plasticity in metals occurs by the motion of dislocations, or line defects, which multiply in the course of plastic deformation. Impeding the motion of dislocations by introducing defects into crystals results in strengthening. Although these fundamental concepts are often assumed to be applicable to crystals of any dimensions, numerous recent studies have shown that conventional plasticity diverges at a certain length scale, with smaller samples reported to be stronger than their bulk counterparts. [1][2][3][4][5][6] Pure metals and some alloys exhibit strong size effects at the submicron scale. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] Size effects in indentation, torsion, and bending have been understood in terms of the nonuniformity of the deformation, which sets up strain gradients leading to hardening. 7 Size effects are also found in thin films, where the strength scales inversely with film thickness and is usually attributed to the confinement of dislocations by the substrate. [8][9][10] Size effects are observed for pristine crystals, as well. 11,12 In the earliest stages of nanoindentation, for example, the crystal volume is extremely small and can be dislocation-free, requiring very large stresses to nucleate new dislocations. In addition, classic experiments on the initially dislocation-free metal whiskers indicated that whiskers with smaller diameters yielded at higher stresses. 13 In typical whiskerlike deformation behavior, initial elastic loading leads to a very high stress followed by a significant drop and continued plastic flow at low stresses. Finally, several molecular dynamics simulations 14-16 and more recent experiments on small pillars 17,18 all support the tenet that smaller is stronger. In spite of much progress on size effects research there is still no unified theory for plastic deformation at the submicron scale.We focus on size effects arising in unconstrained geometries, in the absence of strain gradients, and with nonzero initial dislocation densities. Gold nanopillars ranging in diameter between 200 nm and s...

Amorphous metallic alloys, or metallic glasses, are lucrative engineering materials owing to their superior mechanical properties such as high strength and large elastic strain. However, their main drawback is their propensity for highly catastrophic failure through rapid shear banding, significantly undercutting their structural applications. Here, we show that when reduced to 100 nm, Zr-based metallic glass nanopillars attain ceramic-like strengths (2.25 GPa) and metal-like ductility (25%) simultaneously. We report separate and distinct critical sizes for maximum strength and for the brittle-to-ductile transition, thereby demonstrating that strength and ability to carry plasticity are decoupled at the nanoscale. A phenomenological model for size dependence and brittle-to-homogeneous deformation is provided.

Hierarchically designed structures with architectural features that span across multiple length scales are found in numerous hard biomaterials, like bone, wood, and glass sponge skeletons, as well as manmade structures, like the Eiffel Tower. It has been hypothesized that their mechanical robustness and damage tolerance stem from sophisticated ordering within the constituents, but the specific role of hierarchy remains to be fully described and understood. We apply the principles of hierarchical design to create structural metamaterials from three material systems: (i) polymer, (ii) hollow ceramic, and (iii) ceramic-polymer composites that are patterned into self-similar unit cells in a fractal-like geometry. In situ nanomechanical experiments revealed (i) a nearly theoretical scaling of structural strength and stiffness with relative density, which outperforms existing nonhierarchical nanolattices; (ii) recoverability, with hollow alumina samples recovering up to 98% of their original height after compression to ≥50% strain; (iii) suppression of brittle failure and structural instabilities in hollow ceramic hierarchical nanolattices; and (iv) a range of deformation mechanisms that can be tuned by changing the slenderness ratios of the beams. Additional levels of hierarchy beyond a second order did not increase the strength or stiffness, which suggests the existence of an optimal degree of hierarchy to amplify resilience. We developed a computational model that captures local stress distributions within the nanolattices under compression and explains some of the underlying deformation mechanisms as well as validates the measured effective stiffness to be interpreted as a metamaterial property.H ierarchy is ubiquitous in the natural world; characterizing it, understanding its origins, and discovering its role in enhancing material properties are essential to designing new advanced materials (1-4). Natural structural materials, like Euplectella sponges, radiolarians, and bone, are exceptionally resilient against extreme mechanical environments and seem to draw their robustness from intricate mechanical networks that contain multiple levels of hierarchy (3-7). Hierarchical engineered structures are used in modern architecture, with notable examples being the Eiffel tower and the Garabit viaduct (8); today, hierarchy is seen commonly in construction cranes and building scaffolding. Both natural and engineered structures use the concept of hierarchical design to minimize material use while optimizing structural integrity.The hierarchical scale of a material is defined by its order, which represents the number of distinct structural length scales (2). Design principles and theories describing hierarchical structural materials exist (2, 9), and macroscopic second-and thirdorder 2D cellular solids, like honeycombs (10, 11) and corrugated core sandwich panels (12)(13)(14), have been designed and tested experimentally. Theories that describe the design and optimization of 3D hierarchical trusses have been proposed (15-18)...

No abstract