These tiny manmade structures are amazingly strong California Institute of Technology rightOriginal StudyPosted by Kimm Fesenmaier-Caltech on September 11 2013Engineers have built super small structures with hollow ceramic scaffolds that mimic the lightweight—and very strong—skeletons of organisms such as sea sponges.The nanoscale building blocks display remarkable strength and resistance to failure despite being more than 85 percent air.Scientists have long suspected that the difference between natural materials—like sea sponge skeletons—and manmade products constructed from similar materials has to do with the hierarchical architecture of the biological materials—the way the silica-based skeletons are built up from different structural elements some of which are measured on the scale of billionths of meters or nanometers.Julia R. Greer professor of materials science and mechanics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) says the work was inspired by earlier work to fabricate extremely lightweight microtrusses. �We designed architectures with building blocks that are less than five microns long meaning that they are not resolvable by the human eye.�Constructing these architectures out of materials with nanometer dimensions has enabled us to decouple the materials  strength from their density and to fabricate so-called structural metamaterials which are very stiff yet extremely lightweight.�At the nanometer scale solids have been shown to exhibit mechanical properties that differ substantially from those displayed by the same materials at larger scales.For example Greer s group has shown previously that at the nanoscale some metals are about 50 times stronger than usual and some amorphous materials become ductile rather than brittle. �We are capitalizing on these size effects and using them to make real three-dimensional structures� Greer says.In an advance online publication of the journal Nature Materials Greer and her students describe how the new structures were made and responded to applied forces.The largest structure the team has fabricated thus far using the new method is a one-millimeter cube. Compression tests on the entire structure indicate that not only the individual unit cells but also the complete architecture can be endowed with unusually high strength depending on the material which suggests that the general fabrication technique the researchers developed could be used to produce lightweight mechanically robust small-scale components such as batteries interfaces catalysts and implantable biomedical devicesGreer says the work could fundamentally shift the way people think about the creation of materials.�With this approach we can really start thinking about designing materials backward� she says. �I can start with a property and say that I want something that has this strength or this thermal conductivity for example. Then I can design the optimal architecture with the optimal material at the relevant size and end up with the material I wanted.�The team first digitally designed a lattice structure featuring repeating octahedral unit cells—a design that mimics the type of periodic lattice structure seen in diatoms.Next the researchers used a technique called two-photon lithography to turn that design into a three-dimensional polymer lattice. Then they uniformly coated that polymer lattice with thin layers of the ceramic material titanium nitride (TiN) and removed the polymer core leaving a ceramic nanolattice. The lattice is constructed of hollow struts with walls no thicker than 75 nanometers.�We are now able to design exactly the structure that we want to replicate and then process it in such a way that it s made out of almost any material class we d like—for example metals ceramics or semiconductors—at the right dimensions� Greer says.In a second paper scheduled for publication in the journal Advanced Engineering Materials Greer s group demonstrates that similar nanostructured lattices could be made from gold rather than a ceramic.�Basically once you ve created the scaffold you can use whatever technique will allow you to deposit a uniform layer of material on top of it� Greer says.In the Nature Materials work the team tested the individual octahedral cells of the final ceramic lattice and found that they had an unusually high tensile strength. Despite being repeatedly subjected to stress the lattice cells did not break whereas a much larger solid piece of TiN would break at much lower stresses.Typical ceramics fail because of flaws—the imperfections such as holes and voids that they contain.�We believe the greater strength of these nanostructured materials comes from the fact that when samples become sufficiently small their potential flaws also become very small and the probability of finding a weak flaw within them becomes very low� Greer says.So although structural mechanics would predict that a cellular structure made of TiN would be weak because it has very thin walls she says �we can effectively trick this law by reducing the thickness or the size of the material and by tuning its microstructure or atomic configurations.�Funding from the Dow-Resnick Innovation Fund at Caltech DARPA s Materials with Controlled Microstructural Architecture program and the Army Research Office through the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies at Caltech supported the research. Some of the work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory under a contract with NASA and the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech provided support and infrastructure.Source: CaltechYou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.