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Published February 9, 2018 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Additive manufacturing of 3D nano-architected metals

Abstract

Most existing methods for additive manufacturing (AM) of metals are inherently limited to ~20–50 μm resolution, which makes them untenable for generating complex 3D-printed metallic structures with smaller features. We developed a lithography-based process to create complex 3D nano-architected metals with ~100 nm resolution. We first synthesize hybrid organic–inorganic materials that contain Ni clusters to produce a metal-rich photoresist, then use two-photon lithography to sculpt 3D polymer scaffolds, and pyrolyze them to volatilize the organics, which produces a >90 wt% Ni-containing architecture. We demonstrate nanolattices with octet geometries, 2 μm unit cells and 300–400-nm diameter beams made of 20-nm grained nanocrystalline, nanoporous Ni. Nanomechanical experiments reveal their specific strength to be 2.1–7.2 MPa g^(−1) cm^3, which is comparable to lattice architectures fabricated using existing metal AM processes. This work demonstrates an efficient pathway to 3D-print micro-architected and nano-architected metals with sub-micron resolution.

Additional Information

© 2018 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received: 25 September 2017 Accepted: 17 January 2018. Published online: 09 February 2018. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of JRG's Vannevar-Bush Faculty Fellowship through the Department of Defense. Author Contributions: A.V., S.D. and J.R.G. conceived the concept. A.V. performed synthesis, fabrication, SEM and EDS characterization. S.D. provided information on how to prepare the photoresist. A.K. performed TEM characterization and analysis. X.Z. and C.M.P. performed nanocompression experiments and analyzed the results. A.V. and J.R.G. wrote the manuscript. All authors commented on the manuscript. J.R.G. supervised the project. Data availability: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Published - s41467-018-03071-9.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_3071_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_3071_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_3071_MOESM3_ESM.docx

Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_3071_MOESM4_ESM.mp4

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Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023