Lightweight, flaw-tolerant, and ultrastrong nanoarchitected carbon

Abstract

A long-standing challenge in modern materials manufacturing and design has been to create porous materials that are simultaneously lightweight, strong, stiff, and flaw-tolerant. Here, we fabricated pyrolytic carbon nanolattices with designable topologies by a two-step procedure: direct laser writing and pyrolysis at high temperature. The smallest characteristic size of the nanolattices approached the resolution limits of the available 3D lithography technologies. Due to the designable unit-cell geometries, reduced feature sizes, and high quality of pyrolytic carbon, the created nanoarchitected carbon structures are lightweight, can be made virtually insensitive to fabrication-induced defects, attain nearly theoretical strength of the constituent material, and achieve specific strength up to one to three orders of magnitude above that of all existing micro/nanoarchitected materials.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 18, 2019
Source ID
10.1073/pnas.1817309116

Entities

People

  • Andrey Vyatskikh
  • Huajian Gao
  • Julia R. Greer
  • Xiaoyan Li
  • Xuan Zhang

Organizations

  • Brown University
  • California Institute of Technology
  • Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China
  • National Science Foundation
  • Tsinghua University
  • United States Department of Defense
  • Zhejiang University

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Quantum Dot Semiconductor Device Photonics and Graphene Optoelectronic Materials and THz Physics.
  • Reinforced Composite Materials

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy