Published March 29, 2023 | public
Journal Article

Metasurface‐Enabled Holographic Lithography for Impact‐Absorbing Nanoarchitected Sheets

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Abstract

Nanoarchitected materials represent a class of structural meta-materials that utilze nanoscale features to achieve unconventional material properties such as ultralow density and high energy absorption. A dearth of fabrication methods capable of producing architected materials with sub-micrometer resolution over large areas in a scalable manner exists. A fabrication technique is presented that employs holographic patterns generated by laser exposure of phase metasurface masks in negative-tone photoresists to produce 30–40 µm-thick nanoarchitected sheets with 2.1 × 2.4 cm² lateral dimensions and ≈500 nm-wide struts organized in layered 3D brick-and-mortar-like patterns to result in ≈50–70% porosity. Nanoindentation arrays over the entire sample area reveal the out-of-plane elastic modulus to vary between 300 MPa and 4 GPa, with irrecoverable post-elastic material deformation commencing via individual nanostrut buckling, densification within layers, shearing along perturbation perimeter, and tensile cracking. Laser induced particle impact tests (LIPIT) indicate specific inelastic energy dissipation of 0.51–2.61 MJ kg⁻¹, which is comparable to other high impact energy absorbing composites and nanomaterials, such as Kevlar/poly(vinyl butyral) (PVB) composite, polystyrene, and pyrolized carbon nanolattices with 23% relative density. These results demonstrate that holographic lithography offers a promising platform for scalable manufacturing of nanoarchitected materials with impact resistant capabilities.

Additional Information

© 2023 Wiley-VCH. M.K, S.L, and A.F., contributed equally to this work. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from nFugue through the Office of Sponsored Research at Caltech. The authors also acknowledge Dr. Seyedeh Mahsa Kamali, Dr. Farzaneh Afshinmanesh, Dr. Luizetta Elliott, Phillippe Pearson, Prakriti Somani, and Suki Gu who helped with this project, and Dr. Carlos Portela who helped with the LIPIT experiments. M.K acknowledges the Swiss National Science Foundation for financial support (grant Nr P400P2_194371). Useful discussions with Jim Demetriades, Travis Blake, and Terrisa Duenas are also gratefully acknowledged. Conflict of Interest. J.R.G. and A.F. have financial interest in nFugue, a start-up company that scales up nanoarchitected materials, as founders.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023