3D Printed Tubulanes as Lightweight Hypervelocity Impact Resistant Structures

Abstract

behavior of structures found in nature. Several biomaterials such as bones, shark teeth, [16] seashells, [17,18] ladybug legs, [19] woodpecker beaks, [20] kingfisher beaks, [21] and many others have highly controlled structures in different length scales, from submicrometer to macrometer scale have been explored recently. These studies clarified the correlation between the complex architecture of these structures and the observed mechanical performance. The functional geometric design of natural materials can be used to render high-performance advanced materials.Mimicking natural structures is always challenging due to the lack of appropriate synthesis methods. However, recent advances in additive manufacturing technology (such as 3D printing) opens new pathways for building complex structures, which remain inaccessible using conventional methods. [22][23][24][25] Important results on biomimetic structures with 3D printers to determine the role of geometry on structural mechanical behavior have been recently reported. [26][27][28][29][30] Another study using 3D printing of complex structures called Schwarzites explained how unusual mechanical behavior at the atomic scale is translated into macroscopic properties, which can be scalable to other length scales. [31] Lightweight materials with high ballistic impact resistance and load-bearing capabilities are regarded as a holy grail in materials design. Nature builds these complementary properties into materials using soft organic materials with optimized, complex geometries. Here, the compressive deformation and ballistic impact properties of three different 3D printed polymer structures, named tubulanes, are reported, which are the architectural analogues of cross-linked carbon nanotubes. The results show that macroscopic tubulanes are remarkable high load-bearing, hypervelocity impact-resistant lightweight structures. They exhibit a lamellar deformation mechanism, arising from the tubulane ordered pore structure, manifested across multiple length scales from nano to macro dimensions. This approach of using complex geometries inspired by atomic and nanoscale models to generate macroscale printed structures allows innovative morphological engineering of materials with tunable mechanical responses.

Mechanical Properties of Diamond Schwarzites: From Atomistic Models to 3D-Printed Structures

“…The role of the surface curvature on the mechanical properties of schwarzites and other carbon nanomaterials has been highlighted in recent works that combine Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations with 3D printing techniques. [45][46][47] The optimized atomistic structures from MD simulations are translated into surfaces that generate 3D-printed macroscopic structures.…”

“…At the atomic scale, some TPMS can be associated with stable negatively curved carbon materials known as schwarzites [4]. Recent works used optimized atomic structures to generate surface meshes which were 3D-printed for structural applications, such as load-bearing resistance [5] and hyper-velocity ballistic impacts [6]. There are many different schwarzite families [7], the Diamond (D) one ( Figure 1) was investigated in this work.…”

Atomic Scale Structure Inspired 3D‐Printed Porous Structures with Tunable Mechanical Response

“…3D‐printed polylactide (PLA) tubulane structures show impact resistance for hypervelocity (5.8 km s −1 ). [ 21 ] Polyimide cellular foam fabricated at copious densities (0.032 to 0.128 g cm −3 ) and compression strength results shows that with increase in density compression strength also increases from 0.026 to 2.28 MPa. These enhancements in mechanical strength can occur due to the change in cell size and cell formation.…”

Topologically engineered 3D printed architectures with superior mechanical strength

“…FIGURE 16.Young's modulus of 3D printed structures for topology enhanced strengthening[48,59,110,167,71,73,78,81,82,86,91,93].…”