Extremely resilient nanolabyrinthine materials
Nanolabyrinthine materials with features on the order of nanometers but scalable fabrication up to centimeters were pioneered with extreme mechanical resilience.
The Mechanics & Materials Lab, in collaboration with Professor Julia R. Greer, postdoc Carlos Portela and team, have created a novel type of architected material, coined nanolabyrinthine. The material is extremely lightweight (being composed of ceramic chells with wall thicknesses on the order of just 10 nanometers) and assembled into an overall smooth architecture whose lack of corners and junctions, along with material-level size effects, equips this new nanofoam with extreme mechanical resilience. We demonstrated that this cellular solid retains its stiffness and strength over many load cycles up to large deformation (such as 30% compression).