Size Effects in Nanomaterials and Their Use in Creating Architectured Structural Metamaterials

Abstract

With the increasing use of nanotechnology, mechanical properties of nano‐sized crystals with different initial microstructures are being had been actively investigated. Especially, the size effects on mechanical properties, especially strength and toughness, have attracted significant interest since those would be the most important parameters for the design of mechanically reliable devices such as micro‐electro‐mechanical systems (MEMS). For the past decade, the small‐scale mechanical testing community has unraveled the fundamental mechanisms that govern the size effects in mechanical behavior, and the present time is just around the corner to turning toward a scalable engineered structures consisting of nanoscale components, a scalable three‐dimensional architecture metamaterials where our knowledge on small‐scale plasticity should be incorporated. This chapter overviews some of the size effects that arise in the mechanical behavior of materials at small length scales and then discusses how these nanomechanical effects can be applied towards the fabrication of useful structural ....

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