Lightweight, flaw-tolerant, and ultrastrong nanoarchitected carbon

It has been a long-standing challenge in modern material design to create low-density, lightweight materials that are simultaneously robust against defects and can withstand extreme thermomechanical environments, as these properties are often mutually exclusive: The lower the density, the weaker and...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 116; no. 14; pp. 6665 - 6672
Main Authors Zhang, Xuan, Vyatskikh, Andrey, Gao, Huajian, Greer, Julia R., Li, Xiaoyan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 02.04.2019
SeriesPNAS Plus
Subjects
Carbon
Deformability
Deformation
Density
Density ratio
Design defects
Fabrication
Formability
Lightweight
Physical Sciences
PNAS Plus
Pyrolysis
Strength
Thermomechanical properties
Topology
Unit cell
Vacuum
Weight reduction
iso-truss
nanolattices
specific strength
pyrolytic carbon
octet-truss
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Summary:It has been a long-standing challenge in modern material design to create low-density, lightweight materials that are simultaneously robust against defects and can withstand extreme thermomechanical environments, as these properties are often mutually exclusive: The lower the density, the weaker and more fragile the material. Here, we develop a process to create nanoarchitected carbon that can attain specific strength (strength-to-density ratio) up to one to three orders of magnitude above that of existing micro- and nanoarchitected materials. We use two-photon lithography followed by pyrolysis in a vacuum at 900 °C to fabricate pyrolytic carbon in two topologies, octet- and iso-truss, with unit-cell dimensions of ∼2 μm, beam diameters between 261 nm and 679 nm, and densities of 0.24 to 1.0 g/cm³. Experiments and simulations demonstrate that for densities higher than 0.95 g/cm³ the nanolattices become insensitive to fabrication-induced defects, allowing them to attain nearly theoretical strength of the constituent material. The combination of high specific strength, low density, and extensive deformability before failure lends such nanoarchitected carbon to being a particularly promising candidate for applications under harsh thermomechanical environments.
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Author contributions: H.G., J.R.G., and X.L. designed research; X.Z. and A.V. performed research; X.Z., A.V., H.G., J.R.G., and X.L. analyzed data; and X.Z., H.G., J.R.G., and X.L. wrote the paper.
Contributed by Huajian Gao, February 9, 2019 (sent for review October 8, 2018; reviewed by Yonggang Huang and Christopher M. Spadaccini)
Reviewers: Y.H., Northwestern University; and C.M.S., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1817309116