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.

Among all the plastic pollution, straws have brought particularly intricate problems since they are single use, consumed in a large volume, cannot be recycled in most places, and can never be fully degraded. To solve this problem, replacements for plastic straws are being developed following with the global trend of plastic straw bans. Nevertheless, none of the available degradable alternatives are satisfactory due to drawbacks including poor natural degradability, high cost, low mechanical performance, and poor water stability. Here, all-natural degradable straws are designed by hybridizing cellulose nanofibers and microfibers in a binder-free manner. Straws are fabricated by rolling up the wet hybrid film and sealed by the internal hydrogen bonding formed among the cellulose fibers after drying. The cellulose hybrid straws show exceptional behaviors including 1) excellent mechanical performance (high tensile strength of ≈70 MPa and high ductility with a fracture strain of 12.7%), 2) sufficient hydrostability (10× wet mechanical strength compared to commercial paper straw), 3) low cost, and 4) high natural degradability. Given the low-cost raw materials, the binder-free hybrid design based on cellulose structure can potentially be a suitable solution to solve the environmental challenges brought by the enormous usage of plastics straws.

Reverse electrodialysis (RED) is known as an efficient way of converting the salinity gradient between river water and sea water into energy. However, the high cost and complex fabrication of the necessary ion exchange membranes greatly prohibit the development of the RED process. For the first time, an ionized wood membrane is demonstrated for this application, benefiting from the advantages of natural wood, which is abundant, low cost, sustainable, and easy to scale. The wood membrane maintains the aligned nanochannels of the cellulose nanofibers derived from the natural wood. The surface of the nanochannels can be functionalized to positively or negatively charged by in situ modifying the hydroxyl groups on the cellulose chains to quaternary ammonium or carboxyl groups, respectively. These charged aligned nanochannels serve as nanofluidic passages for selective ion transport with opposite polarity through the wood membrane, resulting in efficient charge separation and generating an electrochemical potential difference. The all‐wood RED device with 100 cells using a scalable stacking geometry generates an output voltage as high as 9.8 V at open circuit from a system of synthetic river water and sea water.

Li metal holds great promise to be the ultimate anode choice owing to its high specific capacity and low redox potential. However, processing Li metal into thin‐film anode with high electrochemical performance and good safety to match commercial cathodes remains challenging. Herein, a new method is reported to prepare ultrathin, flexible, and high‐performance Li–Sn alloy anodes with various shapes on a number of substrates by directly stamping a molten metal solution. The printed anode is as thin as 15 µm, corresponding to an areal capacity of ≈3 mAh cm–2 that matches most commercial cathode materials. The incorporation of Sn provides the nucleation center for Li, thereby mitigating Li dendrites as well as decreasing the overpotential during Li stripping/plating (e.g., <10 mV at 0.25 mA cm–2). As a proof‐of‐concept, a flexible Li‐ion battery using the ultrathin Li–Sn alloy anode and a commercial NMC cathode demonstrates good electrochemical performance and reliable cell operation even after repetitive deformation. The approach can be extended to other metal/alloy anodes such as Na, K, and Mg. This study opens a new door toward the future development of high‐performance ultrathin alloy‐based anodes for next‐generation batteries.

Current ceramic solid-state electrolyte (SSE) films have low ionic conductivities (10−8 to 10−5 S/cm ), attributed to the amorphous structure or volatile Li loss. Herein, we report a solution-based printing process followed by rapid (~3 s) high-temperature (~1500°C) reactive sintering for the fabrication of high-performance ceramic SSE films. The SSEs exhibit a dense, uniform structure and a superior ionic conductivity of up to 1 mS/cm. Furthermore, the fabrication time from precursor to final product is typically ~5 min, 10 to 100 times faster than conventional SSE syntheses. This printing and rapid sintering process also allows the layer-by-layer fabrication of multilayer structures without cross-contamination. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate a printed solid-state battery with conformal interfaces and excellent cycling stability. Our technique can be readily extended to other thin-film SSEs, which open previously unexplores opportunities in developing safe, high-performance solid-state batteries and other thin-film devices.