Topological engineered 3D printing of Architecturally Interlocked Petal-Schwarzites

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, 3D printing, and testing of architecturally interlocked petal-Schwarzites, demonstrating tunable mechanical properties and high specific strength through experimental and simulation methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel class of interlocked Schwarzites structures with tunable properties, combining experimental 3D printing and molecular dynamics simulations.

Findings

Mechanical response depends on layer number and topology.

Experimental and simulation results are in good agreement.

Structures exhibit high specific strength and energy absorption.

Abstract

The topologically engineered complex Schwarzites architecture has been used to build novel and unique structural components with a high specific strength. The mechanical properties of these building blocks can be further tuned, reinforcing with stronger and high surface area architecture. In the current work, we have built six different Schwarzites structures with multiple interlocked layers, which we named architecturally interlocked petal-schwarzites (AIPS). These complex structures are 3D printed into macroscopic dimensions and compressed using uniaxial compression. The experimental results show a strong dependency of mechanical response on the number of layers and topology of the layers. Fully atomistic molecular dynamics compressive simulations were also carried out, and the results are in good agreement with experimental observations. They can explain the underlying AIPS mechanism of high specific strength and energy absorption. The proposed approach opens a new perspective on developing new 3D-printed materials with tunable and enhanced mechanical properties.