One-photon three-dimensional printed fused silica glass with sub-micron features.

The applications of silica-based glass have evolved alongside human civilization for thousands of years. High-precision manufacturing of three-dimensional (3D) fused silica glass objects is required in various industries, ranging from everyday life to cutting-edge fields. Advanced 3D printing technologies have emerged as a potent tool for fabricating arbitrary glass objects with ultimate freedom and precision. Stereolithography and femtosecond laser direct writing respectively achieved their resolutions of ~50 µm and ~100 nm. However, fabricating glass structures with centimeter dimensions and sub-micron features remains challenging. Presented here, our study effectively bridges the gap through engineering suitable materials and utilizing one-photon micro-stereolithography (OµSL)-based 3D printing, which flexibly creates transparent and high-performance fused silica glass components with complex, 3D sub-micron architectures. Comprehensive characterizations confirm that the final material is stoichiometrically pure silica with high quality, defect-free morphology, and excellent optical properties. Homogeneous volumetric shrinkage further facilitates the smallest voxel, reducing the size from 2.0 × 2.0 × 1.0 µm3 to 0.8 × 0.8 × 0.5 µm3. This approach can be used to produce fused silica glass components with various 3D geometries featuring sub-micron details and millimetric dimensions. This showcases promising prospects in diverse fields, including micro-optics, microfluidics, mechanical metamaterials, and engineered surfaces.

Effect of Eccentricity Difference on the Mechanical Response of Microfluidics-Derived Hollow Silica Microspheres during Nanoindentation.

Hollow microspheres as the filler material of syntactic foams have been adopted in extensive practical applications, where the physical parameters and their homogeneity have been proven to be critical factors during the design process, especially for high-specification scenarios. Based on double-emulsion droplet templates, hollow microspheres derived from microfluidics-enabled soft manufacturing have been validated to possess well-controlled morphology and composition with a much narrower size distribution and fewer defects compared to traditional production methods. However, for more stringent requirements, the innate density difference between the core-shell solution of the double-emulsion droplet template shall result in the wall thickness heterogeneity of the hollow microsphere, which will lead to unfavorable mechanical performance deviations. To clarify the specific mechanical response of microfluidics-derived hollow silica microspheres with varying eccentricities, a hybrid method combining experimental nanoindentation and a finite element method (FEM) simulation was proposed. The difference in eccentricity can determine the specific mechanical response of hollow microspheres during nanoindentation, including crack initiation and the evolution process, detailed fracture modes, load-bearing capacity, and energy dissipation capability, which should shed light on the necessity of optimizing the concentricity of double-emulsion droplets to improve the wall thickness homogeneity of hollow microspheres for better mechanical performance.

Ductile amorphous boron nitride microribbons.

The broad applications of ceramic materials in functional devices are often limited by their intrinsic brittleness. Amorphous boron nitride (a-BN), as a promising ceramic has shown high thermal stability and excellent dielectric properties that can be applied to microfabricated aerogel and nano dielectric layers, while its mechanical properties at small scales are yet to be studied. Here we report synthesized a-BN microribbons can have a uniform elongation at a breaking strain of more than 50% upon tension, exhibiting outstanding ductility. Such a-BN microribbons with lengths ranging from tens to hundreds of micro-meters were prepared via the small molecule precursors sol-gel method. Through in situ uniaxial tensile measurements, we demonstrated that a-BN microribbons also display a surprising flaw-tolerance behaviour. Combining high-resolution atomic characterization with molecular dynamics simulations, we reveal that the large tensile plasticity of a-BN originates from the topological deformation induced multiple energy-dissipation mechanisms including unfolding and reorientation of local curly h-BN layers and their interlayer debonding, slippage as well as the intralayer tearing. Our findings provide new insights to develop ductile amorphous covalent-bonded materials for emerging applications.

Three Dimensional Printing of Bioinspired Crossed-Lamellar Metamaterials with Superior Toughness for Syntactic Foam Substitution.

Biological materials such as conch shells with crossed-lamellar textures hold impressive mechanical properties due to their capability to realize effective crack control and energy dissipation through the structural synergy of interfacial modulus mismatch and lamellar orientation disparity. Integrating this mechanism with mechanical metamaterial design can not only avoid the catastrophic post-yield stress drop found in traditional architectural materials with uniform lattice structures but also effectively maintain the stress level and improve the energy absorption ability. Herein, a novel bioinspired design strategy that combines regional particularity and overall cyclicity is proposed to innovate the connotation of long-range periodicity inside the metamaterial, in which the node constraint gradient and crossed-lamellar struts corresponding to the core features of conch shells are able to guide the deformation sequence with a self-strengthening response during compression. Detailed in situ experiments and finite element analysis confirm that the rotated broad layer stacking can shorten and impede the shear bands, further transforming the deformation of bioinspired metamaterial into a progressive, hierarchical way, highlighted by the cross-layer hysteresis. Even based on a brittle polymeric resin, excellent specific energy absorption capacity [4544 kJ/kg] has been achieved in this architecture, which far exceeds the reported metal-based syntactic foams for two orders of magnitude. These results offer new opportunities for the bioinspired metamaterials to substitute the widespread syntactic foams in specific applications required for both lightweight and energy absorption.

Liquid Metal-Polymer Microlattice Metamaterials with High Fracture Toughness and Damage Recoverability.

Biological materials exhibit excellent fracture toughness due to their ability to dissipate energy during crack propagating through the combination of various constituents with different stiffnesses. Replicating this mechanism in engineering materials is important in mechanical systems and emerging applications such as flexible electronics and soft robotics. Here a novel liquid metal (LM)-filled polymer microlattice metamaterial, fabricated by projection micro-stereolithography (PµSL) 3D printing and vacuum filling of gallium (Ga), exhibiting high fracture toughness of 0.8 MJ m-3 , is reported. Moreover, the LM metamaterials demonstrate shape memory effect and even essentially recover its original shape upon severe fractures. These unique features arise from the tunable properties of gallium at a relatively low temperature range. The result offers new insights into design and manufacturing mechanical metamaterials with tunable properties and high recoverability for soft robots, flexible electronics, and biomedical applications.

Experimental and theoretical investigations of non-Newtonian electro-osmotic driven flow in rectangular microchannels.

With the development of microfluidics, electro-osmotic (EO) driven flow has gained intense research interest as a result of its unique flow profile and the corresponding benefits in its application in the transportation of sensitive samples. Sensitive samples, such as DNA, are incapable of enduring strong flow shear induced by conventional hydrodynamic driven methods. EO driven flow is thus a niche area. However, even though there are a few research studies focusing on bio-fluidic samples related to EO driven flow, the majority of them are merely theoretical modeling without solid evidence from experiments due to the inherent complex rheological behavior of the bio-fluids. Challenges occur when the EO driven mechanism meets with complex rheology; vital questions such as can the zeta potential still be assumed to be constant when dealing with fluids with complex rheology? and "Does the shear thinning effect enhance electro-osmotic driven flow?" need to be answered. We conducted experiments using current monitoring and microscopy fluorescence methods, and developed a theoretical model by coupling a generalized Smoluchowski approach with the power-law constitutive model. We calculated the zeta potential and compared the experimental results with modeling to answer the questions. The results show a reduction of zeta potential in the presence of PEO aqueous solutions. A constant zeta potential is also indicated by varying the PEO concentration and the electric field strength.The shear thinning effect is also addressed via experimental data and theoretical calculations. The results show a promising enhancement of the EO driven velocity due to the shear thinning effect.