Nanoporosity-driven deformation of additively manufactured nano-architected metals
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
Nanyang Technological University
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3.
Tsinghua University
Abstract
3D printing methods for small-scale metals enable a unique 10–100 nm dimensional niche where functional feature sizes, critical microstructural detail and atomic-level defects converge, challenging conventional hierarchical relationships and carrying significant nanomechanical implications. We introduce a metal nano-printing system combining two-photon lithography, hydrogel infusion-based additive manufacturing and in situ mechanical experiments on 3D nano-architected Ni, achieving ~100 nm critical dimensions, ~10 nm surface roughness, and a broad range of geometries (periodic vs. non-periodic; beam-based vs. shell-based) with superior specific strengths of ~100 MPa·g − 1·cm3 enabled by an unambiguous smaller is stronger size effect. Experiments identify concentrated-porosity regions as primary deformation-initiation sources and quantify their distribution as input for physics-informed, multiscale finite-element simulations that accurately predict size-dependent mechanical properties governed by nanoporosity-driven deformation. This work integrates experimental and computational approaches for the fabrication, characterization, and evaluation of nano- and micro-architected metals for nanotechnology and nanoscale manufacturing systems.
Copyright and License
© 2026, The Author(s). Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Acknowledgement
W.Z. and J.R.G. gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Basic Energy Sciences from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (DE-SC0016945). Z.L. and H.G. were supported by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) through the Manufacturing, Trade and Connectivity (MTC) Programmatic Grant Advanced Models for Additive Manufacturing (Grant No. M22L2b0111).
Data Availability
Source data are provided with this paper. All data necessary to reproduce these findings is available in the manuscript, supplementary information, and source data. All data supporting this study are available from the corresponding author upon request. Source data are provided with this paper.
See attached file: 41467_2026_69845_MOESM3_ESM.xlsx
Supplemental Material
See file attached. Supplementary information: 41467_2026_69845_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
This PDF file includes:
Supplementary Note 1 to 5
Supplementary Table 1
Supplementary Figure 1 to 13
Supplementary References
Files
s41467-026-69845-8_reference.pdf
Additional details
Identifiers
- PMID
- 41760619
Related works
- Describes
- Journal Article: https://rdcu.be/faNkV (URL)
Funding
- Office of Basic Energy Sciences
- DE-SC0016945
- Agency for Science, Technology and Research
- Manufacturing, Trade and Connectivity (MTC) Programmatic Grant Advanced Models for Additive Manufacturing M22L2b0111
Dates
- Available
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2026-02-28Published online
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) , Kavli Nanoscience Institute
- Publication Status
- In Press