Additive manufacturing of 3D nano-architected metals

Most existing methods for additive manufacturing (AM) of metals are inherently limited to ~20–50 μm resolution, which makes them untenable for generating complex 3D-printed metallic structures with smaller features. We developed a lithography-based process to create complex 3D nano-architected metal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2018-02, Vol.9 (1), p.593-8, Article 593
Main Authors: Vyatskikh, Andrey, Delalande, Stéphane, Kudo, Akira, Zhang, Xuan, Portela, Carlos M., Greer, Julia R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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Additive manufacturing
Beams (structural)
Coordination compounds
Humanities and Social Sciences
Inorganic materials
Lithography
Manufacturing
Metals
multidisciplinary
Nickel
Production methods
Scaffolds
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Three dimensional printing
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Summary:Most existing methods for additive manufacturing (AM) of metals are inherently limited to ~20–50 μm resolution, which makes them untenable for generating complex 3D-printed metallic structures with smaller features. We developed a lithography-based process to create complex 3D nano-architected metals with ~100 nm resolution. We first synthesize hybrid organic–inorganic materials that contain Ni clusters to produce a metal-rich photoresist, then use two-photon lithography to sculpt 3D polymer scaffolds, and pyrolyze them to volatilize the organics, which produces a >90 wt% Ni-containing architecture. We demonstrate nanolattices with octet geometries, 2 μm unit cells and 300–400-nm diameter beams made of 20-nm grained nanocrystalline, nanoporous Ni. Nanomechanical experiments reveal their specific strength to be 2.1–7.2 MPa g −1  cm 3 , which is comparable to lattice architectures fabricated using existing metal AM processes. This work demonstrates an efficient pathway to 3D-print micro-architected and nano-architected metals with sub-micron resolution. Most current methods for additive manufacturing of complex metallic 3D structures are limited to a resolution of 20–50 µm. Here, the authors developed a lithography-based process to produce 3D nanoporous nickel nanolattices with octet geometries and a resolution of 100 nm.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-018-03071-9