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Mechanical metamaterials

Smaller and stronger

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 373–374 (2016)Cite this article

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Fabrication of an ultra-strong glassy carbon nanolattice with a strut diameter of around 200 nm could stimulate the realization of advanced nanoscale architected materials.

The structural and architectural design of materials that span a wide range of length scales has become possible, enabled by improved fundamental insight and advanced fabrication techniques. Now, scientists and engineers are beginning to make micro- and nanoarchitected materials — the so-called metamaterials — with unprecedented properties and performance. In some sense, the Eiffel Tower can be thought of as a type of mechanical metamaterial, whose strength is determined by both the material and the lattice-based architecture. Recent advances in additive manufacturing have led to the creation of micro- and nanoarchitected lightweight metamaterials with tailored stiffness, strength, toughness and energy absorption properties1,2,3. Manipulating the dimensions of their basic building blocks for enhanced performance has been an outstanding challenge, however. Now, writing in Nature Materials, Bauer and co-workers4 report the synthesis of glassy carbon nanolattices with a strut diameter of around 200 nm, and related honeycomb structures with a wall thickness of 140 nm. They show that these nanoarchitected mechanical metamaterials exhibit extremely high specific strength, resulting from their fine length scale.

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Figure 1: Synthesis procedure of glassy carbon nanolattices.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Mechanics, Xiaoyan Li is at the Center for Advanced Mechanics and Materials, Applied Mechanics Laboratory, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China,

    Xiaoyan Li

  2. Huajian Gao is at the School of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA,

    Huajian Gao

Authors
  1. Xiaoyan Li
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  2. Huajian Gao
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Correspondence to Xiaoyan Li or Huajian Gao.

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Li, X., Gao, H. Smaller and stronger. Nature Mater 15, 373–374 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4591

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