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At least 343 records · Page 19

Micromechanics of cyclic deformation in SSME turbopump blade materials

Current and candidate Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) turbopump blade materials are anisotropic, both in their elastic and plastic response. The major objective is to characterize the plastic deformation behavior of a typical single crystal nickel-base superalloy, PWA 1480, and to use this information to help guide the development of anisotropic constitutive models.

Milligan, Walter W.↗

Shear wave generation by mode conversion in picosecond ultrasonics: Impact of grain orientation and material properties

Abstract Picosecond ultrasonics has seen wide application in the investigation of interfaces in semiconductors and 3D imaging in biological systems. Shear ultrasonic waves are important for elastic constant and grain orientation measurement in ceramic materials. In this study, we investigate the impact of grain orientation and material's elastic properties on the generation efficiency of shear waves by mode conversion at a transducer thin film/substrate interface. The solution of acoustic wave equations suggests that crystal grain orientation has a strong impact on the generated shear wave amplitude. This dependence is found to be closely related to the magnitude of longitudinal component of wave displacements. The applicability of analytical model is validated by the experimental results from time‐domain Brillouin scattering. Moreover, material properties determine acoustic wave amplitudes based on the acoustic mismatch model and, particularly, large elastic anisotropy defined by Zener ratio favors strong shear waves. In the light of this analysis, several recommendations on suitable grain orientations and film materials are made to facilitate shear wave detection.

Wang, Yuzhou↗

Spectrally sharp magnetic excitations above the critical temperature in a frustrated Weyl semimetal

The rare-earth α-pyrochlore iridates are a prospective class of conducting frustrated magnets where electronic correlations, large spin-orbit coupling, and geometrical frustration interplay, leading to a rich set of magnetic and electronic phases. Despite their intriguing properties, the magnetic order and excitations in this fundamental class of topological quantum materials remain poorly understood due to challenges in growing large single crystals and insufficient microscopic information on their temperature-dependent phases. Here, by combining state-of-the-art thin-film synthesis, resonant elastic and inelastic X-ray scattering, spin wave analysis, and dynamical spin susceptibility calculations, we unequivocally reveal the presence of spectrally sharp, gapped magnetic excitations in Y 2 Ir 2 O 7 that surprisingly persist well above the Néel transition temperature, signaling the presence of a quasi-universal regime connected to fluctuations on frustrated lattices. This finding implies the existence of a highly unusual cooperative paramagnetic (CP) phase above the ordering temperature and offers an explanation for the puzzling high-temperature magnetic behavior observed across the family of metallic pyrochlore crystals. Understanding such magnetic excitations at technologically relevant temperatures opens up possibilities for novel topological spintronic devices.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

ORNL_AISD_NiNb

This dataset describes the nickel-niobium solid solution binary alloy, where the two constituent elements nickel (Ni) and niobium (Nb) are randomly placed on an underlying crystal lattice. This dataset for nickel-niobium (Ni-Nb) alloys available includes the formation energy and bulk modulus for each crystal structure. Each atomic sample has a disordered phase which is obtained starting from an initial regular crystal structure of type body-centered cubic (BCC), face-centered cubic (FCC), or hexagonal compact packed (HCP). The geometry optimization ensures that all the alloy samples reached the equilibrium with negative formation energy. We perform geometry optimizations using the LAMMPS simulation package [1], a flexible simulation tool for particle-based materials modeling at the atomic, meso, and continuum scales. We utilized the embedded atom model (EAM) potential for Ni and Nb developed in a previous study [2]. The potential could describe behaviors of the liquid and solid phases of Ni-Nb alloy. The structural factors and angular distributions of three atoms are well-matched with X-ray and ab initio-based molecular dynamics data. We prepared the three different crystals with different initial lattice parameters (3.52 Ã… for FCC, 3.32 Ã… for BCC, and 3.5 Ã… for HCP). We performed energy minimization in two steps. Firstly, we minimized the structures with an isotropic unit cell to minimize the side effects from our arbitrary lattice parameters for all other compositions. Then, we applied geometry optimization with a triclinic (non-orthogonal) unit cell to fully minimize the stress components to calculate the elastic constants. In this procedure, we chose 10,000 as the maximum number of allowable steps aimed at obtaining fully relaxed atomic geometries. The dataset consists of three sets of crystal structures. The first set contains 46,086 irregular crystal structures, each of them with 54 atoms, obtained through optimization starting from a regular BCC crystal structure. The second set contains 24,543 irregular crystal structures, each of them with 32 atoms, obtained through optimization starting from a regular FCC crystal structure. The third set contains 39,303 irregular crystal structures, each of them with 48 atoms, obtained through optimization starting from a regular HCP crystal structure. The atomic configurations within each set span the possible compositional range. The three sets have been unified in a global dataset, which is extremely heterogeneous in terms of crystal structures, lattice volumes, and atomic configurations. Organization of files inside the dataset: the dataset contains three subdirectories called • BCC_opt • FCC_opt • HCP_opt based on the type of initial regular structure used to start the geometry optimization. Inside each of these folders, every atomic structure is identified by a string “A_B_Câ€, where A denotes the number of Nb in the system, B denotes index of structure with a given Nb number, and C denotes the total number of structures generated with a given Nb number. For each optimized crystal structure identified by the unique string of characters “A_B_Câ€, three files are provided: • A_B_C_opt.xyz: The optimized geometries in xyz format • A_B_C_opt.cfg: The optimized geometries in cfg format. It includes cell information and atomic energy, and forces calculated from LAMMPS. • A_B_C.elastic: Raw data of 21 elastic constants from LAMMPS output. • A_B_C.bulk: Calculated upper and lower bounds of bulk modulus and averaged one based on Voigt-Reuss-Hill approach from *.elastic. References: [1] A. P. Thompson, H. M. Aktulga, R. Berger, D. S. Bolintineanu, W. M. Brown, P. S. Crozier, P. J. in 't Veld, A. Kohlmeyer, S. G. Moore, T. D. Nguyen, R. Shan, M. J. Stevens, J. Tranchida, C. Trott, and S. J. Plimpton. LAMMPS - a flexible simulation tool for particle-based materials modeling at the atomic, meso, and continuum scales. Comp. Phys. Comm., 271:108171, 2022. [2] Y Zhang, R Ashcraft, MI Mendelev, CZ Wang, and KF Kelton. Experimental and molecular dynamics simulation study of structure of liquid and amorphous ni62nb38 alloy. The Journal of chemical physics, 145(20):204505, 2016.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Anisotropic neutron response of trans-stilbene and impact on a handheld dual particle imager

Here this manuscript details measurements of the anisotropic light-output response of trans-stilbene, henceforth referred to as stilbene, along the three primary crystal planes and analyzes how this anisotropic response impacts neutron image reconstruction in a handheld dual particle imager (H2DPI). A prototype H2DPI composed of stilbene pillars (6 x 6 x 50 mm 3 ) coupled to silicon photomultipliers was built and is capable of imaging both fast neutrons and gamma rays from kilogram quantities of special nuclear material. Stilbene was chosen as the scintillating medium for the imager because of its pulse shape discrimination capability, time resolution and relatively high light output. A drawback to using stilbene, however, is the anisotropic response. A recoiling proton from a neutron elastic-scattering event in stilbene will yield different amounts of scintillation light depending on the direction of the recoiling proton with respect to the crystal lattice. This manuscript analyzes how this anisotropic response impacts neutron image reconstruction in 4π. The light output in the three primary crystal planes of stilbene were independently measured 6–7 times for proton recoil energies ranging from 0.5–5.0 MeV using a quasi-monoenergetic time-of-flight neutron source. The measured light-output data in the three crystal planes were fit with a semi-empirical function based on Birks’ formula. These fits were used to reconstruct the location of a 252 Cf source in front of the imager (0°, -0.8°), to the left of the imager (-90°, -0.8°) and directly above the imager (0°, 90°) to determine if it is necessary to apply the directionally-dependent response of stilbene to accurately reconstruct source locations. A bootstrapping technique was applied to the measured data sets to produce 1000 images composed of 2000 cone projections for each source location and each measured light-output curve. List-mode maximum likelihood expectation maximization was applied to each image; the highest pixel location and the full width at half maximum (FWHM) were then recorded. The average and standard deviations of these parameters were taken for each set of images. The maximum difference in the average azimuthal pixel location when varying between the appropriate and incorrect light-output curves for the source locations at (0°, -0.8°) and (-90°, -0.8°) were respectively found to be 1.85 ± 1.39° and 2.03 ± 1.78°. All other pixel locations and FWHMs were within a single standard deviation of uncertainty. Taken together, the anisotropic response of stilbene has negligible impact on the neutron image reconstruction capability of the H2DPI.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Active microrheology and dynamic phases for pattern-forming systems with competing interactions

We consider the driven dynamics of a probe particle moving through an assembly of particles with competing long-range repulsive and short-range attractive interactions, which form crystal, stripe, labyrinth, and bubble states as the ratio of attraction to repulsion is varied. We show that the probe particle exhibits a depinning-like threshold from an elastic regime, where the probe particle is trapped by interactions with the other particles, to a plastic flow regime, where the probe particle can break bonds in the surrounding medium. For a fixed particle density, the depinning threshold and sliding velocity of the probe particle vary nonmonotonically as the attraction term is increased. A velocity minimum appears near the crystal to stripe crossover, and there is a significant increase in the depinning threshold in the bubble regime when the probe particle is strongly confined inside the bubbles. For fixed attractive interaction but increasing particle density, the behavior is also nonmonotonic, and there are jumps and drops in the velocity and depinning threshold corresponding to points at which the system transitions between different structures. There are also several distinct flow states that can be characterized by the amount of plastic deformation induced by the probe particle in the surrounding medium. Each flow state generates a different amount of effective drag on the probe particle, and there can be jumps in the velocity-force curve at transitions between the states. In conclusion, we also find that when oriented stripes are present, the probe particle can move along the stripe in an edge transport state that has a finite Hall angle.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Monodomain Liquid‐Crystal Elastomer Lattices for Broad Strain‐Rate Mechanical Damping

Designing structures that effectively dissipate energy across a broad range of mechanical loading rates, including those from compression, shock, and vibration, poses a significant engineering challenge. In this study, liquid‐crystal elastomers (LCEs), which possess anisotropic properties due to the alignment of their polymer backbone, are explored. As a result, LCEs exhibit a soft elastic response under mechanical loading, making them ideal for energy dissipation. Advances in additive manufacturing (AM) enable simple fabrication of foamlike dissipative structures with complex lattice geometries. Herein, direct ink write 3D printing, an extrusion AM method, is used to fabricate aligned, monodomain LCE lattice structures for broad strain‐rate mechanical damping. In this work, it is shown that these structures can dissipate strain energy in quasi‐static environments, comparable to traditional elastomeric lattices, and provide improved damping under high strain‐rate drop testing due to LCE soft elasticity. Additionally, under dynamic mechanical vibration, monodomain LCE lattices enhance damping at structural natural frequencies and provide high‐frequency attenuation. Finally, in these findings, a promising method is presented for fabricating mechanical damping devices that effectively dissipate energy across a broad range of loading rates.

3D printings↗

NASA Tech Briefs, June 2013

Topics include: Cloud Absorption Radiometer Autonomous Navigation System - CANS, Software Method for Computed Tomography Cylinder Data Unwrapping, Re-slicing, and Analysis, Discrete Data Qualification System and Method Comprising Noise Series Fault Detection, Simple Laser Communications Terminal for Downlink from Earth Orbit at Rates Exceeding 10 Gb/s, Application Program Interface for the Orion Aerodynamics Database, Hyperspectral Imager-Tracker, Web Application Software for Ground Operations Planning Database (GOPDb) Management, Software Defined Radio with Parallelized Software Architecture, Compact Radar Transceiver with Included Calibration, Software Defined Radio with Parallelized Software Architecture, Phase Change Material Thermal Power Generator, The Thermal Hogan - A Means of Surviving the Lunar Night, Micromachined Active Magnetic Regenerator for Low-Temperature Magnetic Coolers, Nano-Ceramic Coated Plastics, Preparation of a Bimetal Using Mechanical Alloying for Environmental or Industrial Use, Phase Change Material for Temperature Control of Imager or Sounder on GOES Type Satellites in GEO, Dual-Compartment Inflatable Suitlock, Modular Connector Keying Concept, Genesis Ultrapure Water Megasonic Wafer Spin Cleaner, Piezoelectrically Initiated Pyrotechnic Igniter, Folding Elastic Thermal Surface - FETS, Multi-Pass Quadrupole Mass Analyzer, Lunar Sulfur Capture System, Environmental Qualification of a Single-Crystal Silicon Mirror for Spaceflight Use, Planar Superconducting Millimeter-Wave/Terahertz Channelizing Filter, Qualification of UHF Antenna for Extreme Martian Thermal Environments, Ensemble Eclipse: A Process for Prefab Development Environment for the Ensemble Project, ISS Live!, Space Operations Learning Center (SOLC) iPhone/iPad Application, Software to Compare NPP HDF5 Data Files, Planetary Data Systems (PDS) Imaging Node Atlas II, Automatic Calibration of an Airborne Imaging System to an Inertial Navigation Unit, Translating MAPGEN to ASPEN for MER, Support Routines for In Situ Image Processing, and Semi-Supervised Eigenbasis Novelty Detection.

Source record↗

Friction, deformation and fracture of single-crystal silicon carbide

Friction experiments were conducted with hemispherical and conical diamond riders sliding on the basal plane of silicon carbide. The results indicate that, when deformation is primarily elastic, the friction does not depend on crystallographic orientation and there is no detectable fracture or cracking. When, however, plastic deformation occurs, silicon carbide exhibits anisotropic friction and deformation behavior. Surface fracture crack patterns surrounding wear tracks are observed to be of three types. The crack-geometries of two types are generally independent of orientation, the third crack, however, depends on the orientation. All surface cracks extend into subsurface. Anisotropic friction, deformation and fracture on the basal plane are primarily controlled by the slip system and cleavage.

Miyoshi, K.↗

The use of the PUCOT for elastic modulus measurements on intermetallics at high temperatures

The piezoelectric ultrasonic composite oscillator technique (PUCOT) is being applied to measure the elastic constants of the aluminides in the temperature ranges 300 to 1700 K (CoAl and NiAl) and 300 to 1500 K (FeAl). The PUCOT consists of piezoelectric quartz drive and gauge crystals to excite longitudinal or torsional ultrasonic (80 kHz) resonant stress waves in the specimen and alumina spacer rod of appropriate resonant lengths. The resonant system is driven by a closed loop oscillator which maintains a constant gauge voltage and hence constant strain amplitude in the specimen. While the specimen is heated at 20 K/h the resonant period is measured continuously. The elastic moduli are calculated from these values of the resonant period and accurate determinations of specimen length. The technique is described and some results given.

Wolfenden, A.↗

Out-of-equilibrium interactions and collective locomotion of colloidal spheres with squirming of nematoelastic multipoles

Many living and artificial systems show similar emergent behavior and collective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of mammals, and crowds of people. What all these systems often have in common is that new collective properties like flocking emerge from interactions between individual self-propelled or driven units. Such systems are naturally out-of-equilibrium and propel at the expense of consumed energy. Mimicking nature by making self-propelled or externally driven particles and studying their individual and collective motility may allow for deeper understanding of physical underpinnings behind collective motion of large groups of interacting objects or beings. Here, in this work, using a soft matter system of colloids immersed into a liquid crystal, we show that resulting so-called nematoelastic multipoles can be set into a bidirectional locomotion by external oscillating electric fields. Out-of-equilibrium elastic interactions between such colloidal objects lead to collective flock-like behaviors emerging from time-varying elasticity-mediated interactions between externally driven propelling particles. Repulsive elastic interactions in the equilibrium state can be turned into attractive interactions in the out-of-equilibrium state under applied external electric fields. We probe this behavior at different number densities of colloidal particles and show that particles in dense dispersions collectively select the same direction of a coherent motion due to elastic interactions between near neighbors. In our experimentally implemented design, their motion is highly ordered and without clustering or jamming often present in other colloidal transport systems, which is promising for technological and fundamental-science applications, like nano-cargo transport, out-of-equilibrium assembly, and microrobotics.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Deep glassy state dynamic data challenge glass models: Elastic models

The idea of an “ideal” glass transition temperature has persisted at least since the work from Kauzmann when it was observed that the entropy of glass-forming liquids extrapolated to below that of the crystal, thus suggesting the need for a phase transition at a finite or non-zero absolute temperature. This thermodynamic paradox was also found to be related to the observations of a diverging of the extrapolated viscosity or relaxation times at a temperature near to this ideal glass transition. Recently, however, we have carried out experiments using both an ancient amber material and an ultra-stable amorphous fluoropolymer that challenge the ideas of the divergence of the viscosity or relaxation times at this ideal glass transition. In the present manuscript we have evaluated two theories of the glass transition that are based on ideas related to elasticity of the amorphous glass-forming material. We find that the models from both J. Dyre and his group and of K.S. Schweizer and his group not only show non-diverging behavior but are also in some agreement with the new data, though still showing somewhat slower dynamics than those observed in the experiments. The work shows that the data are good enough to distinguish between theories and it is suggested that other mechanisms may be needed to fully describe the non-diverging responses of the ultra-stable glasses.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Magnetism in the axion insulator candidate Eu 5 In 2 Sb 6

Eu 5 In 2 Sb 6 is a member of a family of orthorhombic nonsymmorphic rare-earth intermetallics that combines large localized magnetic moments and itinerant exchange with a low carrier density and perpendicular glide planes. This may result in special topological crystalline (wallpaper fermion) or axion insulating phases. Recent studies of Eu 5 In 2 Sb 6 single crystals have revealed colossal negative magnetoresistance and multiple magnetic phase transitions. Here, we clarify this ordering process using neutron scattering, resonant elastic x-ray scattering, muon spin-rotation, and magnetometry. The nonsymmorphic and multisite character of Eu 5 In 2 Sb 6 results in coplanar noncollinear magnetic structures with an Ising-like net magnetization along the a axis. A reordering transition, attributable to competing ferro- and antiferromagnetic couplings, manifests as the onset of a second commensurate Fourier component. In the absence of spatially resolved probes, the experimental evidence for this low-temperature state can be interpreted either as an unusual double- q structure or in a phase separation scenario. The net magnetization produces variable anisotropic hysteretic effects which also couple to charge transport. The implied potential for functional domain physics and topological transport suggests that this structural family may be a promising platform to implement concepts of topological antiferromagnetic spintronics. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Rahn, M. C. (ORCID:0000000174038288)↗

Highly Extensible X-ray Diffraction Toolkit

This code has been previous released as open source under LLNL-CODE-529294. The HEXRD program comprises a library of X-ray diffraction analysis tools and a stand-alone GUI application. While there are many software packages that provide similar capabilities, HEXRD was designed to provide an extremely flexible and extensible basis for describing a broad array of X-ray diffraction instruments; this includes both mono- and poly-chromatic modalities as well as poly- and single-crystal samples. The high-level objects include Material: an abstraction for defining crystalline materials, including unit cell parameters and anisotropic elastic moduli Imageseries: an interface for series of diffraction images containing one or more frames, including provisions for metadata. Instrument: an abstraction of an X-ray diffraction instrument including support for the definition of multiple detector elements as well as powder, Laue, and mono-chromatic single/multi-grain diffraction analysis modalities (including attendant calibration routines). The hexrdgui package is a standalone PySide2/Qt5 GUI built on top of hexrd. The 0.8.1 release includes various bug fixes as well as some new functionality in the GUI, including: o Enhancements to the import tools for LLNL diffraction instruemtns (PXRDIP and TARDIS) o The ability to save 1-d LeBail fits of integrated diffraction spectra.

Barton, NathanR.↗

Predicting Elastic Properties of Materials from Electronic Charge Density Using 3D Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Materials representation plays a key role in machine learning-based prediction of materials properties and new materials discovery. Currently both graph and three-dimensional (3D) voxel representation methods are based on the heterogeneous elements of the crystal structures. Here, we propose to use electronic charge density (ECD) as a generic unified 3D descriptor for materials property prediction with the advantage of possessing close relation with the physical and chemical properties of materials. We developed an ECD-based 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for predicting the elastic properties of materials, in which CNNs can learn effective hierarchical features with multiple convolving and pooling operations. Extensive benchmark experiments over 2170 $Fm\bar3m$ face-centered-cubic materials show that our ECD-based CNNs can achieve good performance for elasticity prediction. Especially, our CNN models based on the fusion of elemental Materials-Agnostic Platform for Informatics and Exploration features and ECD descriptors achieved the best fivefold cross-validation performance. More importantly, we showed that our ECD-based CNN models can achieve significantly better extrapolation performance when evaluated over nonredundant data sets, where there are few neighbor-training samples around test samples. As an additional validation, we evaluated the predictive performance of our models on 329 materials of space group $Fm\bar3m$ by comparing to density functional theory calculated values, which shows a better prediction power of our model for bulk modulus than shear modulus. Because of the unified representation power of ECD, it is expected that our ECD-based CNN approach can also be applied to predict other physical and chemical properties of crystalline materials.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Pervasive symmetry-lowering nanoscale structural fluctuations in the cuprate La 2−𝑥 ⁢Sr 𝑥 ⁢Cu⁢O 4

The cuprate superconductors are among the most widely studied quantum materials, yet there remain fundamental open questions regarding their electronic properties and the role of structural degrees of freedom. Recent neutron and x-ray scattering measurements uncovered exponential scaling with temperature of the strength of orthorhombic fluctuations in the tetragonal phase of La 2−𝑥⁢ Sr 𝑥 ⁢Cu⁢O 4 and Tl 2 ⁢Ba 2 ⁢Cu⁢O 6+𝛿 , unusual behavior that closely resembles prior results for the emergence of superconducting fluctuations, and that points to a common origin rooted in inherent correlated structural inhomogeneity. Here, in this study, we use neutron and x-ray diffuse scattering to provide further insight into structural fluctuations in La 2−𝑥 ⁢Sr 𝑥 ⁢Cu⁢O 4 . We perform measurements up to temperatures that approach the melting point of the undoped parent compound, and we investigate the effects of in situ in-plane uniaxial elastic stress and plastic deformation. Our neutron scattering results for the parent compound La 2 ⁢Cu⁢O 4 reveal that short-range orthorhombic fluctuations persist to the maximum experimental temperature of nearly 1000 K, i.e., to a significant fraction of the crystallization temperature. At this temperature, the spatial characteristic length extracted from the momentum-space data is still about three lattice constants. The neutron scattering experiment enables quasistatic discrimination and reveals that the response is increasingly dynamic at higher temperatures. We also find that neither compressive elastic stress along the tetragonal [110] direction nor irreversible plastic deformation activating the ⟨100⟩⁢[001] slip system significantly alter the robust orthorhombic fluctuations. Overall, these results support the notion that these fluctuations couple to subtle, underlying inhomogeneity that underpins the cuprate phase diagram. Finally, in La 1.8⁢ Sr 0.2⁢ Cu⁢O 4 , we uncover low-energy structural fluctuations at a nominally forbidden reflection that are distinct from the orthorhombic distortions. While the origin of these fluctuations is not clear, they might be related to the presence of extended defects such as dislocations or stacking faults.

Spieker, R. J. [Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, M↗

Effective pair potential for random fcc CoCrFeMnNi alloys

The single-phase equiatomic CoCrFeMnNi alloy is a random solid solution of five elements on the face-centered cubic lattice, whose pure constituents crystallize in very different structures and exhibit diverse magnetic properties. Due to the randomness of the alloy, 80% of nearest neighbor bonds are between unlike elements and thus the details of bonding in pure structures are less important. The elastic moduli of this alloy give rise to small Cauchy pressure C 12 - C 44 , which suggests that the dominant part of bonding may be described by a simple pair potential. We test this hypothesis by developing a long-range Lennard-Jones potential in which the equilibrium crystal structures of pure constituents are taken as reference. The standard mixing rules for regular solutions are then adopted to obtain parameters for bonds between unlike elements in the quinary system. The transferability of this potential to quaternary CoCrFeNi, ternary CoCrNi, and binary FeNi alloys is investigated and the predictions compared with experiments and density functional theory calculations. By sampling over a large number of random configurations, we investigate the effect of compositional randomness on misfit volumes, energies of point defects and stacking faults, and the dislocation friction stresses experienced by moving edge and screw dislocations.

Materials Science↗

Coaxial Direct Ink Writing of Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Elastomers in 3D Architectures

Abstract Cholesteric liquid crystal elastomers (CLCEs) hold great promise for mechanochromic applications in anti‐counterfeiting, smart textiles, and soft robotics, thanks to the structural color and elasticity. While CLCEs are printed via direct ink writing (DIW) to fabricate free‐standing films, complex 3D structures are not fabricated due to the opposing rheological properties necessary for cholesteric alignment and multilayer stacking. Here, 3D CLCE structures are realized by utilizing coaxial DIW to print a CLC ink within a silicone ink. By tailoring the ink compositions, and thus, the rheological properties, the cholesteric phase rapidly forms without an annealing step, while the silicone shell provides encapsulation and support to the CLCE core, allowing for layer‐by‐layer printing of self‐supported 3D structures. As a demonstration, free‐standing bistable thin‐shell domes are printed. Color changes due to compressive and tensile stresses can be witnessed from the top and bottom of the inverted domes, respectively. When the domes are arranged in an array and inverted, they can snap back to their base state by uniaxial stretching, thereby functioning as mechanical sensors with memory. The additive manufacturing platform enables the rapid fabrication of 3D mechanochromic sensors thereby expanding the realm of potential applications for CLCEs.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗