3D Printing of Ultralight Biomimetic Hierarchical Graphene Materials with Exceptional Stiffness and Resilience

Abstract

Assembly of lightweight engineering and functional materials with superb mechanical performance, such as high stiffness, super resilience, and stability, is highly demanded to pave ways for their practical applications. [1] However, how to simultaneously achieve both stiffness and resilience in a man-made material at low-density remains a challenging scientific and engineering issue. Biological materials have found their way to achieve outstanding mechanical properties at low density by assembling sophisticate hierarchical structures from microscopic to macroscopic scales, and thus provide inspirations for designing and manufacturing advanced biomimetic materials. [2] Plant materials, such as plant stem [3] and wood, [4] represent an important class of lightweight natural materials with superb mechanical properties. The slender grass stems of Elytrigia repens is a representative natural material with high mechanical performance and lightweight features owing to a specially evolved hierarchical architecture with a macroscopically hollow and microscopically cellular structure. The macroscopically hollow structure combined with the cellular microstructure serves as an excellent force-bearing structure that is conducive to the dispersion of strain and stress, and thus efficiently enhances the stiffness, and resilience and reduce the density, simultaneously. [5] In recent years, the constructions of biomimetic structures have attracted extensive attention because of their potential ability to achieve high mechanical properties and lightweight artificial engineering and functional materials. [6] Despite progresses in the construction of biomimetic structures, the poor mechanical properties at low density remain as a major bottleneck in artificial biomimetic materials, which are mainly due to the lack of appropriate structures at both macro-and microlevels at the same time.The ink-based 3D printing, as a powerful additive manufacturing technique for producing 3D structures both in microscopic and macroscopic scales, [6b,7] shows great potential to assembly materials into 3D hierarchical structures. Additionally, 3D printing displays distinct advantages of high degree of freedom in structure design, which enable the ability to design and construct versatile structures for realizing the Biological materials with hierarchical architectures (e.g., a macroscopic hollow structure and a microscopic cellular structure) offer unique inspiration for designing and manufacturing advanced biomimetic materials with outstanding mechanical performance and low density. Most conventional biomimetic materials only benefit from bioinspired architecture at a single length scale (e.g., microscopic material structure), which largely limits the mechanical performance of the resulting materials. There exists great potential to maxime the mechanical performance of biomimetic materials by leveraging a bioinspired hierarchical structure. An ink-based three-dimensional (3D) printing strategy to manufacture an ultralight biomimetic hierarchical g...

Freeze Casting: From Low‐Dimensional Building Blocks to Aligned Porous Structures—A Review of Novel Materials, Methods, and Applications

“…Another strategy for achieving ultralight hierarchical graphene materials is 3D printing of partially reduced graphene oxide (pr‐GO) ink combined with freeze casting. [ 59 ] By simultaneously engineering 3D‐printed macroscopic hollow structures and constructing an ice‐crystal‐induced cellular microstructure, graphene materials can achieve high stiffness and resilience.…”

Graphene Quantum Dots for Quantum GPU architectures.

“…We are now in the process of setting up such 3DP facilities as an intentional synergetic economy. (Gao 2016;Guo, Lv, and Bai 2019;Campbell and Ivanova 2013;Peng et al 2019;Jonušauskas et al 2019;Yoon et al 2017;Ahmad, Gopinath, and Dutta 2019;Mineta, Masuda, and Hong 2018;Berger 2009) Graphene is conducting and computing and can be printed at quantum scales lending itself to the design of graphene quantum dots. PLA provides the base substrate.…”

Mechanical Properties Tailoring of 3D Printed Photoresponsive Nanocellulose Composites

“…Additive manufacturing technologies, however, and in particular 3D printing, show promising results for the artificial production of synthetic composite materials with controlled microstructures. [ 3–6 ] With a bottom‐up approach, these technologies allow for a high geometrical freedom and an efficient spatial control over natural building blocks and composition. In particular, natural and biocompatible anisotropic building blocks, such as cellulose nanocrystals (CNC), have attracted great interest from the scientific community due to their reinforcing properties and high potential in biomedical applications.…”