Mechanical properties articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Achieving a wide angular response in single layer acoustic metalenses is challenging. By leveraging perfect acoustic symmetry conversion, the authors realize an aberration free metalens with a wide field-of-hearing, up to 140 degrees.

    • Dongwoo Lee
    • , Beomseok Oh
    •  & Junsuk Rho

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Knitted fabrics are prized for their stretchability, breathability, and long-wearability in everyday life. This study combines experiments and simulations to present a micromechanical approach to understanding the origin of the anisotropic elasticity of four canonical patterns of knitted fabrics.

    • Krishma Singal
    • , Michael S. Dimitriyev
    •  & Elisabetta A. Matsumoto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Continuous industrialization and human activities have led to severe water quality deterioration. Here, a structure-function integrated system is developed by Douglas fir wood inspired metamaterial catalysts with robust and high throughput water purification performances.

    • Lei Zhang
    • , Hanwen Liu
    •  & Jian Lu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Organic afterglow materials have potential in self-monitoring applications but it is challenging to design materials with desired properties. Here, the authors report the development of a lifetime tunable organic afterglow system for use in mechanical self-monitoring 3D printed structures.

    • Rongjuan Huang
    • , Yunfei He
    •  & Wei Huang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    High and medium-entropy alloys have shown excellent mechanical performance, yet the role of short-range order (SRO) on these properties has been unclear. Here, the authors demonstrate that the reduction of SRO by deformation leads to rejuvenation, explaining their remarkable damage tolerance.

    • Yang Yang
    • , Sheng Yin
    •  & Andrew M. Minor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Kinks define boundaries between distinct configurations of a material. Here, the authors reveal the emergence of propagating kinks in purely dissipative kirigami and show that such structures can shape-change into different textures depending on how fast they are stretched enabling basic mechanical tasks.

    • Shahram Janbaz
    •  & Corentin Coulais

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The fabrication of polymeric membranes with high permeance and remarkable selectivity for simultaneous H2 purification and CO2 capture is challenging. Here, the authors design a polymer membrane with sub-micro pores via controlled transformation of amine-linked polymer films into benzimidazole- and amine-linked polymer layers.

    • Xueru Yan
    • , Tianqi Song
    •  & Xinlei Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deformation twinning in body-centered cubic (BCC) metals is generally believed to be controlled by twin nucleation, but facilitated by rapid twin growth once the nucleation energy barrier is overcome. Here, the authors demonstrate both nucleation- and growth-controlled twinning modes in BCC Ta nanocrystals depending on the crystal size.

    • Li Zhong
    • , Yin Zhang
    •  & Scott X. Mao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this work, authors demonstrate highly stretchable conductive porous elastomers that can achieve up to 1200% strain with low or negative Poisson’s ratios by uniaxial, biaxial, and triaxial hot-pressing strategies.

    • Xiaoyu Zhang
    • , Qi Sun
    •  & Guoqing Zu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A shellular is a micro-architectured material, composed of a continuous smooth-curved thin shell in the form of a triply periodic minimal surface. Here, authors propose schellular designs applied to pressure vessels and demonstrate its competitive practical features against spherical and cylindrical vessels.

    • Yoon Chang Jeong
    • , Seung Chul Han
    •  & Kiju Kang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Stretchable polymer semiconductors with high mechanical and electrical properties are challenging to develop. Wu et al. show that reversible molecular ordering under strain important for performance optimization and relative stretchability can be used to compare the relative strain tolerance of materials.

    • Hung-Chin Wu
    • , Shayla Nikzad
    •  & Zhenan Bao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Body-centered cubic refractory metals are known to exhibit excellent high-temperature strength, but often suffer from brittle fracture. Here, the authors produce a bulk pure Mo with stable fine-grain structure after powder metallurgy, Y-type hot rolling and ultra-high temperature annealing (1000~1700 °C) that exhibits room temperature superplasticity.

    • Wenshuai Chen
    • , Xiyao Li
    •  & Zenglin Zhou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This work introduces a 2D porphyrinic metal-organic framework based on DCS origami tessellation, displaying unique folding behavior inspired by origami mechanics. This breakthrough paves the way for MOFs toward mechanical metamaterials.

    • Eunji Jin
    • , In Seong Lee
    •  & Wonyoung Choe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ice formation on grooved surfaces is ubiquitous, but controlling orientation is difficult due to lack of mechanistic insight. Here, the authors observed oriented growth using graphene oxide nanosheets as probes, revealing the effect of groove size, and programmed ice growth to fabricate freeze-cast metamaterials.

    • Meng Li
    • , Nifang Zhao
    •  & Hao Bai

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Optimisation tasks in the inverse design of metamaterials with machine learning were limited due to the representations of generative models. Here the author comments a recent publication in Nature Communications which generates a latent space representation that unlocks non-linear optimisations.

    • Angkur Jyoti Dipanka Shaikeea

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Truss metamaterials are ubiquitous but their vast design space is far from fully explored. Here, authors use machine learning to present a unified, continuous latent space description, enabling the rapid generation of trusses with tunable or exceptional linear and nonlinear mechanical properties.

    • Li Zheng
    • , Konstantinos Karapiperis
    •  & Dennis M. Kochmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The entanglement of fibrous elements produces flexible structures with enhanced strength and resilience to abrasion. Here, the authors report the weaving of organic crystals into flexible and robust patches with plain, twill, and satin topologies of arbitrary porosity, expanding one-dimensional crystals into flexible, two-dimensional planar structures with potential for future applications in flexible electronics.

    • Linfeng Lan
    • , Liang Li
    •  & Hongyu Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Small-scale metallic materials often suffer from a lack of tensile ductility. Here, the authors report an unusual room-temperature super-elongation in CoCrFeNi nanopillars from spatial and synergistic coordination of deformation twinning and dislocation slips due to chemical heterogeneities.

    • Qian Zhang
    • , Ranming Niu
    •  & Xiaoyan Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electrostrictors are materials that develop mechanical strain proportional to the square of the applied electric field. Here authors report. Zr-doped-Ceria as a new lead-free electrostrictive material with a similar electrostriction coefficient to the best electrostrictor material currently in use.

    • Maxim Varenik
    • , Boyuan Xu
    •  & Igor Lubomirsky

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mechanically robust, flexible and thermally insulating ceramic aerogels are challenging to obtain due to the conflicting nature of these properties. Here the authors resolved these contradictions and developed a strong yet flexible aerogel, for application in extreme conditions, by laminated structure design.

    • Lei Su
    • , Shuhai Jia
    •  & Hongjie Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The traditional way of beating metals to improve their properties is not practical to 3D printed parts with intricate geometry. Here, the authors demonstrate how to program microstructural modifications of metals site-specifically during 3D printing to tune their properties.

    • Shubo Gao
    • , Zhi Li
    •  & Matteo Seita

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are many potential applications for non-centrosymmetric molecular crystals, but due to their typical brittle nature, efficiency of applications declines on prolonged use. Here, the authors report an autonomous self-healing ability of dibenzoate derivative single crystals that can retain its non-linear optical response.

    • Saikat Mondal
    • , Pratap Tanari
    •  & C. Malla Reddy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Complex computerized geometries can be obtained by additive manufacturing. However, the printing of purely three-dimensional polymer shapes possesses inherent poor mechanical stability. Here, the authors overcome this drawback by the light-driven orientation of liquid crystals to guide the alignment of acrylate prepolymers along the direction parallel to UV light vibrations.

    • Xiaolu Sun
    • , Shaoyun Chen
    •  & Dongxian Zhuo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Smart monitoring devices with integrated mechanical protection and piezoelectric induction are limited. Here, the authors report a strategy to grow piezoelectric Rochelle salt crystals in 3D-printed cuttlebone-inspired structures to produce smart monitoring devices with integrated mechanical protection and electrical sensing capability.

    • Qingqing He
    • , Yushun Zeng
    •  & Yang Yang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fields of stress and plastic strain tensors in a sample under high pressures in diamond-anvil cells are important, but measuring them is difficult. Here, the authors suggest a coupled experimental-analytical-computational approach to measure them before, during, and after α−ω transformation in Zr.

    • Valery I. Levitas
    • , Achyut Dhar
    •  & K. K. Pandey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The performance of membrane desalination of seawater is hampered by fouling. Here the authors develop smart gating hybrid membranes by surface coating with polymer-embedded thermosalient crystals. These membranes enhance pure water flux by over 40% in saltwater desalination by osmotic distillation.

    • Elvira Pantuso
    • , Ejaz Ahmed
    •  & Gianluca Di Profio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Embolization is one of the most promising strategies for clinical disease treatments, however, the existing embolic materials normally have poor embolization effectiveness. Here, the authors report Janus particle-engineered structural lipiodol droplets by programming the self-assembly of Janus particles at the lipiodol-water interface to achieve highly efficient renal embolization.

    • Sijian Tao
    • , Bingquan Lin
    •  & Jun-Bing Fan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Manipulating the internal interactions within biological fibers to tune macroscopic properties is important but challenging, and can limit applications. Here, the authors report the use of dynamic imine chemistry for engineering molecular interactions and forming strong and tough protein fibers.

    • Jing Sun
    • , Haonan He
    •  & Kai Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, Mei and Chen propose an in-memory mechanical computing architecture with simplified and reduced data exchange, where computing occurs within mechanical memory units, to facilitate the design of intelligent mechanical systems.

    • Tie Mei
    •  & Chang Qing Chen

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