Structural materials articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    A free-swimming soft robot inspired by deep-sea creatures, with artificial muscle, power and control electronics spread across a polymer matrix, successfully adapts to high pressure and operates in the deep ocean.

    • Guorui Li
    • , Xiangping Chen
    •  & Wei Yang

  • Article |

    Bulk ultrafine-grained steel is prepared by an approach that involves the rapid production of coherent, disordered nanoprecipitates, which restrict grain growth but do not interfere with twinning or dislocation motion, resulting in high strength and ductility.

    • Junheng Gao
    • , Suihe Jiang
    •  & W. Mark Rainforth

  • Perspective |

    Opportunities for the application of fibrillated cellulose materials—which can be extracted from renewable resources—and broader manufacturing issues of scale-up, sustainability and synergy with the paper-making industry are discussed.

    • Tian Li
    • , Chaoji Chen
    •  & Liangbing Hu

  • Article |

    A reprogrammable mechanical metamaterial constructed of bistable unit cells that can be switched independently and reversibly between two stable states with distinct mechanical properties using magnetic actuation is demonstrated.

    • Tian Chen
    • , Mark Pauly
    •  & Pedro M. Reis

  • Article |

    A jigsaw-style configuration of interlocking structures identified in the elytra of the remarkably tough diabolical ironclad beetle, Phloeodes diabolicus, is used to inspire crush-resistant multilayer composites for engineering joints.

    • Jesus Rivera
    • , Maryam Sadat Hosseini
    •  & David Kisailus

  • Article |

    A Damascus-like steel consisting of alternating hard and soft layers is created by using a laser additive manufacturing technique and digital control of the processing parameters.

    • Philipp Kürnsteiner
    • , Markus Benjamin Wilms
    •  & Dierk Raabe

  • Article |

    Layered nanocomposites fabricated using a continuous and scalable process achieve properties exceeding those of natural nacre, the result of stiffened matrix polymer chains confined between highly aligned nanosheets.

    • Chuangqi Zhao
    • , Pengchao Zhang
    •  & Lei Jiang

  • Article |

    Atomic-resolution observations combined with simulations show that grain boundaries within elemental copper undergo temperature-induced solid-state phase transformation to different structures; grain boundary phases can also coexist and are kinetically trapped structures.

    • Thorsten Meiners
    • , Timofey Frolov
    •  & Christian H. Liebscher

  • Article |

    The synthesis of surprisingly stable, free-standing single layers of amorphous carbon and their analysis by atomic-resolution imaging could settle a debate about their atomic arrangement and offer unusual electronics applications.

    • Chee-Tat Toh
    • , Hongji Zhang
    •  & Barbaros Özyilmaz

  • Review Article |

    Structural metals enable improved energy efficiency through their reduced mass, higher thermal stability and better mechanical properties; here, methods of improving the sustainability of structural metals, from recycling to contaminant tolerance, are described.

    • Dierk Raabe
    • , C. Cem Tasan
    •  & Elsa A. Olivetti

  • Article |

    Inspired by the enhanced mechanical strength of microstructured metals, damage-tolerant architected materials are developed in which the internal structure is granular, with different regions having different lattice orientations.

    • Minh-Son Pham
    • , Chen Liu
    •  & Jedsada Lertthanasarn

  • Perspective |

    The phenomenon of ultralow friction between sliding incommensurate crystal surfaces—structural superlubricity—is examined, and the challenges and opportunities involved in its extension to the macroscale are assessed.

    • Oded Hod
    • , Ernst Meyer
    •  & Michael Urbakh

  • Letter |

    A robust ceramic/refractory metal (ZrC/W)-based composite for use in heat exchangers in concentrated solar power plants above 1,023 kelvin is described, having attractive high-temperature thermal, mechanical and chemical properties combined with cost-effective processing.

    • M. Caccia
    • , M. Tabandeh-Khorshid
    •  & K. H. Sandhage

  • Letter |

    A scheme for implementing multi-step topological reorganization of a mechanical metamaterial is demonstrated, which proceeds autonomously, without the need for external control.

    • Corentin Coulais
    • , Alberico Sabbadini
    •  & Martin van Hecke

  • Letter |

    A process is described for the transformation of bulk wood into a low-cost, strong, tough, lightweight structural material, by the partial removal of lignin and hemicellulose followed by hot-pressing to densify the natural wood.

    • Jianwei Song
    • , Chaoji Chen
    •  & Liangbing Hu

  • Letter |

    The relaxation dynamics of granular materials is more like that of complex fluids than that of thermal glass-forming systems, owing to the absence of the ‘cage effect’.

    • Binquan Kou
    • , Yixin Cao
    •  & Yujie Wang

  • Letter |

    In copper components containing highly oriented nanotwins, correlated ‘necklace’ dislocations moving back and forth offer an unusually fatigue-resistant response to engineering stress.

    • Qingsong Pan
    • , Haofei Zhou
    •  & Lei Lu

  • Letter |

    The limits of dislocation-mediated metal plasticity are studied by using in situ computational microscopy to reduce the enormous amount of data from fully dynamic atomistic simulations into a manageable form.

    • Luis A. Zepeda-Ruiz
    • , Alexander Stukowski
    •  & Vasily V. Bulatov

  • Letter |

    Zirconium nanoparticles introduced into aluminium alloy powders control solidification during 3D printing, enabling the production of crack-free materials with strengths comparable to the corresponding wrought material.

    • John H. Martin
    • , Brennan D. Yahata
    •  & Tresa M. Pollock

  • Letter |

    Combining the benefits of nanocrystals with those of amorphous metallic glasses leads to a dual-phase material—comprising sub-10-nanometre-sized nanocrystalline grains embedded in amorphous glassy shells—that exhibits a strength approaching the ideal theoretical limit.

    • Ge Wu
    • , Ka-Cheung Chan
    •  & Jian Lu

  • Letter |

    Suitably engineered mechanical metamaterials show static non-reciprocity—that is, the transmission of motion from one side to the other depends on the direction of that motion.

    • Corentin Coulais
    • , Dimitrios Sounas
    •  & Andrea Alù

  • Article |

    A robust and scale-independent strategy for the design of reconfigurable architected materials (in which properties are adjusted by altering structure rather than composition) is described, based on space-filling assemblies of polyhedra.

    • Johannes T. B. Overvelde
    • , James C. Weaver
    •  & Katia Bertoldi

  • Letter |

    Moving mechanical interfaces need to be lubricated to ensure long life and easy slippage; here, a new type of coating is described—comprising nitrides of either molybdenum or vanadium, together with a copper or nickel catalyst—that generates protective tribofilms from lubricating oils.

    • Ali Erdemir
    • , Giovanni Ramirez
    •  & Subramanian K. R. S. Sankaranarayanan

  • Letter |

    Lattices of cubic building blocks that deform anisotropically and that are designed to fit together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle are 3D printed to create aperiodic, frustration-free, mechanical metamaterials; these metamaterials act as programmable shape-shifters and are able to perform pattern analysis.

    • Corentin Coulais
    • , Eial Teomy
    •  & Martin van Hecke

  • Letter |

    Molecular dynamics simulations of 90° domain walls in PbTiO3 are used to construct a nucleation-and-growth-based analytical model that quantifies the dynamics of many types of domain walls in various ferroelectrics, suggesting intrinsic domain-wall motion as a universal mechanism for ferroelectric switching.

    • Shi Liu
    • , Ilya Grinberg
    •  & Andrew M. Rappe

  • Letter |

    Cold-drawing of multimaterial fibres consisting of a brittle core embedded in a ductile polymer cladding results in controllable fragmentation of the core to produce uniformly sized rods parallel to the drawing direction for cylindrical geometries and narrow, parallel strips perpendicular to the drawing direction for flat geometries.

    • Soroush Shabahang
    • , Guangming Tao
    •  & Ayman F. Abouraddy

  • Letter |

    An alloy design strategy that aims for phase metastability, rather than phase stability, is described that will lead to the development of transformation-induced plasticity-assisted, dual-phase high-entropy alloys, which exhibit a rare combined increase in strength and ductility.

    • Zhiming Li
    • , Konda Gokuldoss Pradeep
    •  & Cemal Cem Tasan

  • Article |

    Crystal phase switching between zinc-blende and wurtzite phases during the growth of gallium arsenide nanowires is observed experimentally, and explained via changes in the geometry of the catalytic droplet sitting on top of the growing nanowire.

    • Daniel Jacobsson
    • , Federico Panciera
    •  & Frances M. Ross

  • Article |

    Practical applications of magnesium as a lightweight structural metal are limited by its high work hardening, low ductility and fracture at very low strains; now molecular dynamics simulations reveal the origins of these problems and offer a route to design magnesium alloys with improved mechanical properties.

    • Zhaoxuan Wu
    •  & W. A. Curtin

  • Letter |

    This study shows that metallic glasses can be rejuvenated (taken to higher energy states with more plasticity) by thermally cycling them at relatively low temperatures (well below the glass transition temperature); this is attributed to the effect of intrinsic structural inhomogeneities in the glassy state, which translate into localized internal strains as the temperature is cycled and the different regions expand and contract by different amounts.

    • S. V. Ketov
    • , Y. H. Sun
    •  & A. L. Greer

  • Letter |

    Alloying steel with aluminium improves the material’s strength-to-weight ratio, but the resulting formation of brittle intermetallic compounds within the steel matrix reduces its ductility; here the morphology and distribution of the intermetallic precipitates are controlled to alleviate this problem.

    • Sang-Heon Kim
    • , Hansoo Kim
    •  & Nack J. Kim

  • Letter |

    Metallic liquids of single elements have been successfully vitrified to their glassy states by achieving an ultrafast quenching rate in a new experimental design, of which the process has been monitored and studied by a combination of in situ transmission electron microscopy and atoms-to-continuum computer modelling.

    • Li Zhong
    • , Jiangwei Wang
    •  & Scott X. Mao

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