Architectured materials

micromechanics modeling

Kirigami, the ancient art of paper cutting and folding to create three-dimensional structures, recently sheds new light on the three-dimensional nanofabrication techniques as it holds the key to building a large variety of micro-/nanostructures with unique and flexible functionalities. Compared with traditional 3D micro-/nanofabrication, kirigami and origami enable the shape transformation from 2D precursors to 3D architectures without the need of precise 3D translation in direct lithography or accurate alignment during indirect multilayer stacking. Benefiting from their unique transformation characteristics such as rotation and twisting, kirigami and origami greatly enrich the 3D geometries and complexities in the frontier of both fundamental sciences and practical applications, compared with those from conventional techniques. Using focused ion beam irradiation as our “atomic-scissors”, we introduce a one-step and on-site nano-kirigami method with nanoscale accuracy by in situ cutting and buckling a suspended gold film. By using the topography-guided stress equilibrium during global ion beam irradiation, versatile buckling, rotation, and twisting of nanostructures are simultaneously or selectively achieved. The exotic 3D structures are accurately controllable by programming ion doses, and well predictable by using an elastoplastic bilayer model.

A bilayer model of the stress distribution in gold nanofilm under global ion beam irradiation.

Animations of the fabrication and deformation processes.

In designing architectured materials, our approach of combining mechanical modeling and fabrication constraints leads to the physical realization of a broad class of intricate structures which have demonstrated unprecedented mechanical, optical and acoustic properties (Liu et al., 2018) (Chen et al., 2021) (Liu et al., 2018) (Al-Ketan et al., 2018) (Surjadi et al., 2019) (Cushing* et al., 2021) (Shen et al., 2023).

References

2023

  1. Anisotropic Metallic Microlattice Structures for Underwater Operations
    Chen Shen , Charles Rohde , Colby W Cushing , Junfei Li , Zheng Jie Tan , Huifeng Du, Xiuyuan Peng , Preston S Wilson , Michael R Haberman , Nicholas X Fang , and  others
    Advanced Engineering Materials, 2023

2021

  1. Electromechanically reconfigurable optical nano-kirigami
    #Shanshan Chen , #Zhiguang Liu , #Huifeng Du , #Chengchun Tang , Chang-Yin Ji , Baogang Quan , Ruhao Pan , Lechen Yang , Xinhao Li , Changzhi Gu , and  others
    Nature communications, 2021
  2. Characterization of an underwater metamaterial made of aluminum honeycomb panels at low frequencies
    Colby W Cushing* , Preston S Wilson , Michael R Haberman , Chen Shen , Junfei Li , Steven A Cummer , Zheng Jie Tan , Chu Ma , Huifeng Du, and Nicholas X Fang
    The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2021

2019

  1. Mechanical metamaterials and their engineering applications
    James Utama Surjadi , Libo Gao , Huifeng Du, Xiang Li , Xiang Xiong , Nicholas Xuanlai Fang* , and Yang Lu*
    Advanced Engineering Materials, 2019

2018

  1. Nano-kirigami with giant optical chirality
    #Zhiguang Liu , #Huifeng Du , Jiafang Li* , Ling Lu , Zhi-Yuan Li , and Nicholas X Fang*
    Science advances, 2018
  2. Invited Article: Nano-kirigami metasurfaces by focused-ion-beam induced close-loop transformation
    Zhiguang Liu , Huifeng Du, Zhi-Yuan Li , Nicholas X Fang , and Jiafang Li*
    Apl Photonics, 2018
  3. Microarchitected stretching-dominated mechanical metamaterials with minimal surface topologies
    Oraib Al-Ketan , Rachid Rezgui , Reza Rowshan , Huifeng Du, Nicholas X Fang , and Rashid K Abu Al-Rub*
    Advanced Engineering Materials, 2018