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Published April 2, 2019 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Lightweight, flaw-tolerant, and ultrastrong nanoarchitected carbon

Abstract

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/cm^3. Experiments and simulations demonstrate that for densities higher than 0.95 g/cm^3 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.

Additional Information

© 2019 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND). Contributed by Huajian Gao, February 9, 2019 (sent for review October 8, 2018; reviewed by Yonggang Huang and Christopher M. Spadaccini). PNAS published ahead of print March 18, 2019. This work was supported by the Department of Defense through a Vannevar-Bush Faculty Fellowship (to J.R.G.), National Natural Science Foundation of China Grants 11522218 and 11720101002 (to X.L.), National Basic Research of China Grant 2015CB932500 (to X.L.), and National Science Foundation Grant DMR-1709318 (to H.G.).

Attached Files

Published - 6665.full.pdf

Supplemental Material - pnas.1817309116.sapp.pdf

Supplemental Material - pnas.1817309116.sm01.avi

Supplemental Material - pnas.1817309116.sm02.avi

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Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 20, 2023