Caltech Progresses Research Into Nanoscale 3D Printed Metals

When it comes to 3D printing even the largest structures, understanding the smallest details or imperfections can prove the difference between success and failure. In order to better understand how 3D printed objects perform in the nanoscale, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have recently made a new discovery that has led to a new technique for 3D printing metals that are much stronger than similarly sized parts, which can be invisible to the naked eye.

The research was carried out by the lab of Julia R. Greer, Professor of Materials Science, Mechanics and Medical Engineering and director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute. Building upon previous experiments in 2022, Greer’s lab developed a fabrication process technique for printing micro-sized metal objects that could be as thick as just a few pieces of paper. This year, the team has taken the size from the micro-scale to the nano-scale.

The nanoscale 3D printed lattice structure.

The shift takes the 3D printed parts and shrinks them down into a scale a thousandth the size of their previous experiments. The result revealed something somewhat unexpected: The smaller the print, the more disorderly the materials appeared on the atomic scale. In a normal-sized construction, that disorder would constitute a low-quality construction, prone to breakage and other weaknesses. However, in the nanoscale, the disorderly arrangement of these materials resulted in a part that was three to five times stronger than a construction with more ‘orderly’ arranged atoms.