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Nanostructured
materials achieve
unprecedented
scalability
Assistant Professor Xiaoyu “Rayne” Zheng has published a study in
the journal Nature Materials that describes a new process to create lightweight, strong, and super-elastic 3-D printed metallic nanostructured
materials with unprecedented scalability, a full seven orders of magnitude
control of arbitrary 3-D architectures.
These multiscale metallic materials have displayed super elasticity
because of their designed hierarchical 3-D architectural arrangement and
nanoscale hollow tubes, resulting in more than a 400 percent increase of
tensile elasticity over conventional lightweight metals and ceramic foams.
The approach, which produces multiple levels of 3-D hierarchical lattices with nanoscale features, could be useful anywhere there’s a need for a
combination of stiffness, strength, low weight, and high flexibility — such
as in structures to be deployed in space, flexible armors, lightweight vehicles, and batteries, opening the door for applications in aerospace, military, and automotive industries.
Natural materials, such as trabecular bone and the toes of geckos,
have evolved with multiple levels of 3-D architectures, spanning from the
nanoscale to the macroscale. Human-made materials have yet to achieve
this delicate control of structural features.
The process Zheng and his collaborators use to create the material is
an innovation in a digital light 3-D printing technique that overcomes current tradeoffs between high resolution and build volume, a major limitation
in scalability of current 3-D printed microlattices and nanolattices.