Structural materials articles within Nature Materials

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Energy-favoured grain rotation in nanocrystalline metals is shown to cause surface roughness at the atomic scale, providing fundamental insight for grain boundary engineering in materials design.

    • Jakob Schiøtz
    •  & Karsten W. Jacobsen

  • News & Views |

    Introducing high-density ordered nanoprecipitates into martensitic steel increases strength at modest cost.

    • J. W. Morris Jr

  • Feature |

    Xiuyan Li and K. Lu discuss a strategy, alternative to alloying, to tailor the mechanical properties of metals. By engineering defects, metals with bespoke performance might be obtained while reducing the materials' compositional complexity.

    • Xiuyan Li
    •  & K. Lu

  • Feature |

    Paulo J. M. Monteiro, Sabbie A. Miller and Arpad Horvath provide an overview of the challenges and accomplishments in reducing the environmental burden of concrete production.

    • Paulo J. M. Monteiro
    • , Sabbie A. Miller
    •  & Arpad Horvath

  • Editorial |

    By considering the environmental impact of materials through their whole life cycle, materials scientists can help develop more sustainable alternatives.

  • News & Views |

    Scaling of the phonon damping with the wavevector in glasses is found to be different from the traditionally assumed Rayleigh scattering, and related to surprising, long-range correlations in the local elasticity matrix.

    • Jeppe C. Dyre

  • Editorial |

    The application of advanced materials in aerospace presents multiple scientific and regulatory challenges that must be addressed.

  • Commentary |

    Humankind's aerospace aspirations are placing unprecedented demands on vehicle propulsion systems. Advanced structural ceramics are playing a key role in addressing these challenges.

    • Nitin P. Padture

  • Interview |

    David Rugg is the Senior Engineering Fellow in Materials at Rolls-Royce plc. He talks to Nature Materials about the need to understand scientific fundamentals to develop reliable and high-performance materials for jet engines, and the importance of university collaborations.

    • John Plummer

  • News & Views |

    Titanium aluminide alloys are lightweight and have attractive properties for high-temperature applications. A new growth method that enables single-crystal production now boosts their mechanical performance.

    • Michael Schütze

  • Commentary |

    The successful adoption of metallic additive manufacturing in aviation will require investment in basic scientific understanding of the process, defining of standards and adaptive regulation.

    • Jaime Bonnín Roca
    • , Parth Vaishnav
    •  & M. Granger Morgan

  • Commentary |

    Metallic materials are fundamental to advanced aircraft engines. While perceived as mature, emerging computational, experimental and processing innovations are expanding the scope for discovery and implementation of new metallic materials for future generations of advanced propulsion systems.

    • Tresa M. Pollock

  • Article |

    A large-area fabrication approach to achieve three-dimensional architectured metamaterials, with structural features spanning seven orders of magnitude, results in advanced mechanical properties, including high elasticity.

    • Xiaoyu Zheng
    • , William Smith
    •  & Christopher M. Spadaccini

  • Article |

    Molecular materials are shown to have asymmetry in their elastic modulus and coefficient of thermal expansion in tension and compression, associated with terminal chemical groups that alter network connectivity.

    • Joseph A. Burg
    •  & Reinhold H. Dauskardt

  • Feature |

    Electron microscopy has seen a massive boom in China. Ze Zhang and Xiaodong Han discuss what this could mean for materials research and development.

    • Ze Zhang
    •  & Xiaodong Han

  • Interview |

    Metallurgy has been crucial to the development of China and its economy. Ke Lu, director of the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, talks to Nature Materials about the outlook for metallurgy and materials science in China.

    • John Plummer

  • News & Views |

    New findings suggest that the mechanical stretching of layered crystals can transform them from a polar to a nonpolar state. This could spur the design of multifunctional materials controlled by an electric field.

    • Venkatraman Gopalan
    •  & Roman Engel-Herbert

  • Article |

    By means of a model of calcite single crystals containing high and tunable amounts of occluded amino acids, the hardness of the crystals can be quantitatively correlated with their composition.

    • Yi-Yeoun Kim
    • , Joseph D. Carloni
    •  & Fiona C. Meldrum

  • Letter |

    The design of large-pore proton conductors with well-defined high-order structures is challenging. Proton conduction in a crystalline covalent organic framework 2–4 orders of magnitude higher than microporous polymers is now demonstrated.

    • Hong Xu
    • , Shanshan Tao
    •  & Donglin Jiang

  • News & Views |

    Fabrication of an ultra-strong glassy carbon nanolattice with a strut diameter of around 200 nm could stimulate the realization of advanced nanoscale architected materials.

    • Xiaoyan Li
    •  & Huajian Gao

  • News & Views |

    A plant-inspired approach can be used to print hydrogels that dynamically change shape on immersion in water in order to yield prescribed complex structures.

    • Michael D. Dickey

  • Letter |

    Disordering in complex oxides is important for their radiation resistance. It is now shown that pyrochlores disorder by the formation of a weberite-like phase, with similar behaviour observed in spinels, adding complexity to their disordering.

    • Jacob Shamblin
    • , Mikhail Feygenson
    •  & Maik Lang

  • Article |

    Mechanical metamaterials can exhibit exceptional strength due to their small sizes. Now, a nanoscale lattice of glassy carbon, fabricated by shrinking a microscale lattice, has demonstrated a compressive strength of up to 3 GPa.

    • J. Bauer
    • , A. Schroer
    •  & O. Kraft

  • News & Views |

    Large single-crystalline graphene monolayers have been synthesized on a Cu–Ni alloy using a local precursor feeding method with an enhanced growth rate. The fast production of wafer-scale single crystals brings graphene closer to real applications.

    • Li Lin
    •  & Zhongfan Liu

  • News & Views |

    An implantable, flexible mesh with embedded electrodes for sensing neural activity in vivo improves brain-sampling efficiency and reduces the amount of cortical tissue injured.

    • Tarun Saxena
    •  & Ravi V. Bellamkonda

  • Commentary |

    Twenty years ago, the 'phonon-glass, electron-crystal' concept changed thinking in thermoelectric materials research, resulting in new high-performance materials and an increased focus on controlling structure and chemical bonding to minimize irreversible heat transport in crystals.

    • Matt Beekman
    • , Donald T. Morelli
    •  & George S. Nolas

  • Letter |

    Aggregations of fire ants are viscoelastic with identical elastic and viscous moduli, and exhibit shear-thinning behaviour when deformed beyond the linear regime.

    • Michael Tennenbaum
    • , Zhongyang Liu
    •  & Alberto Fernandez-Nieves

  • News & Views |

    The walls of microtubules can self-repair bending-induced damage.

    • Bela M. Mulder
    •  & Marcel E. Janson

  • News & Views |

    An additive manufacturing technique makes heterogeneous composites with tunable local microstructure and composition.

    • John W. C. Dunlop
    •  & Peter Fratzl

  • News & Views |

    Strength, ductility and corrosion resistance have been simultaneously obtained in a low-density lithium-containing magnesium alloy, thereby enhancing its potential use in transportation.

    • Gerald S. Frankel

  • Article |

    A magnesium-based alloy with large lithium content demonstrates high specific strength in combination with corrosion resistance, associated with the formation of a lithium carbonate surface film that protects the alloy from its environment.

    • Wanqiang Xu
    • , Nick Birbilis
    •  & Michael Ferry

  • Article |

    A single, self-coiled wire is shown to exhibit a Poisson function ranging from above 1 in compression to below 0 in tension. Such material architectures may offer new functionalities in mechanical devices.

    • David Rodney
    • , Benjamin Gadot
    •  & Laurent Orgéas

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