Scalable Fabrication of High-Performance Thin-Shell Oxide Nanoarchitected Materials via Proximity-Field Nanopatterning

Abstract

Nanoarchitected materials are considered as a promising research field, deriving distinctive mechanical properties by combining nanomechanical size effects with conventional structural engineering. Despite the successful demonstration of the superiority and feasibility of nanoarchitected materials, scalable and facile fabrication techniques capable of macroscopically producing such materials at a low cost are required to take advantage of the nanoarchitected materials for specific applications. Unlike conventional techniques, proximity-field nanopatterning (PnP) is capable of simultaneously obtaining high spatial resolution and mass producibility in synthesizing such nanoarchitected materials in the form of an inch-scale film. Herein, we focus on the feasibility of using PnP as a scalable fabrication technique for three-dimensional nanostructures and the superiority of the resultant thin-shell oxide nanoarchitected materials for specific applications, such as lightweight structural materials, mechanically robust nanocomposites, and high-performance piezoelectric materials. This review will discuss and summarize the relevant results obtained for nanoarchitected materials synthesized by PnP and provide suggestions for future research directions for scalable manufacturing and application.

Rationally Designed TiO2 Nanostructures of Continuous Pore Network for Fast‐Responding and Highly Sensitive Acetone Sensor

“…The 3D TiO 2 was fabricated directly on the Pt interdigitated electrodes (IDEs) using proximity-field nanopatterning (PnP) technique (Figure S1, Supporting Information). [28,37,47,48] In brief, a spatial filtered 355 nm Nd:YAG laser was irradiated through the conformal phase mask to the photoresist. The conformal phase mask generates variation in the light path to yield periodic constructive or destructive interference patterns when passing through photoresist (Talbot effect, Figure S2, Supporting Information).…”

“…The fabrication details for 3D TiO 2 have been described in previous reports by the group. [27,37,38,[47][48][49]52,53] Briefly, for depositing a photoresist (PR) film by a spin-casting method, the edges of the electrodes were first covered with the commercial adhesives, thereby minimizing the undesired surface contamination during the PR coating. After an adhesion-promoting thin (≈2 µm) PR (SU-8 2, Microchem) layer was fabricated in the form of an open-window pattern at the electrode, [27] a relatively thick (≈10 µm) PR (SU-8 10, Microchem) layer that defines the 3D nanostructure was additionally coated over the pre-structured pattern by dropping a 1 g of PR and spin casting with 3000 rpm for 30 s. The thick PR layer was carefully soft baked in 2 steps: 65 °C for 30 min and 95 °C for 30 min.…”

Fundamental principles and development of proximity-field nanopatterning toward advanced 3D nanofabrication

“…Through the development of micro-/nanotechnologies, it has been proven that nano-physicochemical properties (including the stretchability and thermoelectric and photocatalytic properties) originating from various classes of 3D nanostructures can be successfully extended to bulk properties through an inch-scale production of the pattern [40,53,65,[83][84][85][86][87]. A wide range of high-value-added applications such as energy storage systems [60,[88][89][90][91][92][93][94], optical films [95], structural materials [96][97][98][99][100], and sensory devices [39,58,[101][102][103] have since become possible to implement through a wafer-scale production. It should be mentioned that the material substitution from a 3D polymeric template into ceramic, metal, and organic functional materials through atomic layer deposition [84-87, 89, 91, 95, 98], electroplating [60,83,88,93], and infiltration [40,53], respectively, can be used to expand the technical functionality during this 3D nanofabrication process.…”

Piezoelectric Mat as Door Bell

“…Piezoelectric energy can be harvested to convert walking motion from the human body into electrical power (Howells, 2009). Piezoelectric energy harvesting has attracted wide attention from researchers especially in the last decade due to its advantages such as high power density, architectural simplicity, and scalability (Esmaeeli et al, 2019;Gonzalez-Lagunas, 2017;Fu et al, 2018;Chen et al, 2019;Bae et al, 2021). This results many experiments, including piezoelectric on roads, speed bumps, etc (Walubita et al, 2018;Chen et al, 2017).…”