Insensitivity to Flaws Leads to Damage Tolerance in Brittle Architected Meta-Materials.

ABSTRACT: Cellular solids are instrumental in creating lightweight, strong, and damage-tolerant engineering materials. By extending feature size down to the nanoscale, we simultaneously exploit the architecture and material size effects to substantially enhance structural integrity of architected meta-materials. We discovered that hollow-tube alumina nanolattices with 3D kagome geometry that contained pre-fabricated flaws always failed at the same load as the pristine specimens when the ratio of notch length (a) to sample width (w) is no greater than 1/3, with no correlation between failure occurring at or away from the notch. Samples with (a/w) > 0.3, and notch length-to-unit cell size ratios of (a/l) > 5.2, failed at a lower peak loads because of the higher sample compliance when fewer unit cells

SUBMITTER: Montemayor LC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4738344 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature