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Multiscale metallic metamaterials

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 1100–1106 (2016)Cite this article

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An Addendum to this article was published on 27 March 2017

This article has been updated

Abstract

Materials with three-dimensional micro- and nanoarchitectures exhibit many beneficial mechanical, energy conversion and optical properties. However, these three-dimensional microarchitectures are significantly limited by their scalability. Efforts have only been successful only in demonstrating overall structure sizes of hundreds of micrometres, or contain size-scale gaps of several orders of magnitude. This results in degraded mechanical properties at the macroscale. Here we demonstrate hierarchical metamaterials with disparate three-dimensional features spanning seven orders of magnitude, from nanometres to centimetres. At the macroscale they achieve high tensile elasticity (>20%) not found in their brittle-like metallic constituents, and a near-constant specific strength. Creation of these materials is enabled by a high-resolution, large-area additive manufacturing technique with scalability not achievable by two-photon polymerization or traditional stereolithography. With overall part sizes approaching tens of centimetres, these unique nanostructured metamaterials might find use in a broad array of applications.

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Figure 1: Nickel alloy hierarchical metamaterial and critical features across seven orders of magnitude in length scale.
Figure 2: Hybrid hierarchical metamaterials from combinations of microarchitectures.
Figure 3: Tunable compressive response of fractal-like metamaterial.
Figure 4: Uniaxial tensile responses of hybrid hierarchical metamaterials.

Change history

  • 07 March 2017

    In the version of this Article originally published, Fig. 3e used data from ref. 3 that has since been corrected. The Al2O3 nanolattice dataset has been corrected to reflect this. In addition, the Al2O3 hollowtube dataset from ref. 14 has been added to the plot. These changes do not affect the data or findings of the present study.

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Acknowledgements

This work was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. Funding support from DOE LDRD LabWide 15-LW-083, Virginia Tech Startup support and SCHEV fund from the State of Virginia and DARPA MCMA (Materials with Controlled Microstructural Architecture, Program Manager J. Goldwasser) is gratefully acknowledged. The authors wish to acknowledge Y. Wang and M. Messner for useful input (LLNL-JRNL-677190). Large-area projection microstereolithography has been submitted and is pending a US patent.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA

    Xiaoyu Zheng, Huachen Cui & Da Chen

  2. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550, USA

    William Smith, Julie Jackson, Bryan Moran, Jianchao Ye, Nicholas Rodriguez, Todd Weisgraber & Christopher M. Spadaccini

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

    Nicholas Fang

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Contributions

X.Z. conceived and directed the research; X.Z. and W.S. designed structures; X.Z. designed the experiments. J.J., B.M., H.C. and X.Z. manufactured samples; W.S., H.C., D.C. and N.R. performed measurements; X.Z. and T.W. performed analytical and numerical analysis. J.Y. performed ex situ measurements on nickel–phosphorus; W.S., N.R., H.C. and X.Z. analysed data; X.Z. wrote the paper. X.Z. and C.M.S. supervised research. All authors contributed to interpreting the data, preparing and editing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xiaoyu Zheng.

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Zheng, X., Smith, W., Jackson, J. et al. Multiscale metallic metamaterials. Nature Mater 15, 1100–1106 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4694

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