Title:Printing with light: Additive Micro/Nano Manufacturing and Multi-functional 3D Architected

Metamaterials by Design  

Reporter: Prof.Xiaoyu Zheng

Date：9th June 2018

Location：A424

Content ：  

Material properties are governed by their chemical composition and spatial arrangement of constituent elements at multiple length-scales. This fundamentally limits material properties with respect to each other creating trade-offs when selecting materials for specific applications. For example, few solid materials exist considerably lighter than water.  To decrease the density beyond this point, materials must have a porosity, which comes at the cost of a disproportional degradation of other desirable properties.

We create materials with combinations of previously unachievable properties: 3D architected metamaterials. These materials are as light as carbon aerogels, but with orders of magnitude higher stiffness and strength.  They utilize interconnected 3D hierarchical micro-structures, rather than relying on chemistry alone, to greatly expand the performance of a material. I will discuss a suite of scalable additive micro- and nano manufacturing technologies to enable fast manufacture of these ultralight metamaterials in polymer, metals, ceramics and nanocomposites. Attention is focused on how rapid prototyping techniques are being evolved into a suite of novel manufacturing processes capable of creating traditionally unprocessable material building blocks, and proliferating them into scalable, macroscopic dimensions with hierarchical 3D features spanning from tens of nanometers, to micrometers, centimeters and above. Next, we examine the potential to introduce designed-in attributes from disparate physical property space into metamaterials. These attributes include lightweight, flexibility, fracture resistant, high temperature resistant, sensing and actuation, which could transform our ability to tailor new properties and functions out of a single artificial material building block, rather than relying on multiple components.