Related papers: Design principles for textured multi-layered compo…

Composites are often made heterogeneous in nature to fulfill the functional demands imposed by the environment, but remain difficult to fabricate synthetically due to the lack of adequate and easily accessible processing tools. We report on…

The architectures of biological hard materials reveal finely tailored complex assemblies of mineral crystals. Numerous recent studies associate the design of these local assemblies with impressive macroscopic response. Reproducing such…

Natural ceramic composites present complex microstructures that lead to tortuous crack paths and confer them high toughness. Current microreinforced composites do not yet reach the same level of complexity in their microstructures,…

Texture in dense or porous ceramics can enhance their functional and structural properties. Current methods for texturation employ anisotropic particles as starting powders and processes that drive their orientation into specific…

Ceramic materials are ubiquitous in technologies operating under high mechanical, thermal or chemical constrains. Research in ceramic processing aims at creating ceramics with properties that are still challenging to obtain, such as…

Manipulating the way in which colloidal particles self-organise is a central challenge in the design of functional soft materials. Meeting this challenge requires the use of building blocks that interact with one another in a highly…

Many biological materials exhibit a multiscale porosity with small, mostly nanoscale pores as well as large, macroscopic capillaries to simultaneously achieve optimized mass transport capabilities and lightweight structures with large inner…

Polymer-Attenuated Coulombic Self-Assembly (PACS) is a flexible experimental approach for generating crystals from simple colloidal building blocks. The central components are charged spherical particles coated with a polymer brush that…

Inorganic/inorganic composites are found in multiple applications crucial for the energy transition, from nuclear reactor to energy storage devices. Their microstructures dictate a number of properties, such as mass transport or fracture…

Cloaking is a method of making obstacles undetectable. Here we cloak unit cells of a magnetic pattern squeezed into an otherwise periodic pattern from a magnetically driven colloidal flow. We apply a time-periodic external magnetic field…

In particular types of layer- or lamellar-like microstructures such as pearlite and lath martensite, plastic slip occurs favorably in directions parallel to inter-lamellar boundaries. This may be due to the interplay between morphology and…

We propose the use of topographic modulation of surfaces to select and localize particles in nematic colloids. By considering convex and concave deformations of one of the confining surfaces we show that the colloid-flat surface repulsion…

Anisotropy at the level of the inter-particle interaction provides the particles with specific instructions for the self-assembly of target structures. The ability to synthesize non-spherical colloids, together with the possibility of…

The ability to assemble mesoscopic colloidal lattices above a surface is important for fundamental studies related with nucleation and crystallization, but also for a variety of technological applications in photonics and micro-engineering.…

Spatial ordering of matter elicits exotic properties sometimes absent from a material's constituents. A few highly mineralised natural materials achieve high toughness through delocalised damage, whereas synthetic particulate composites…

We study mutual alignment and interactions between colloidal particles of dissimilar shapes and dimensions when dispersed in a nematic host fluid. Convex pentagonal and concave starfruit-shaped nanoprisms and microspheres induce dipolar or…

Acoustic-directed assembly is a modular and flexible bottom-up technique with the potential to pattern a wide range of materials. Standing acoustic waves have been previously employed for patterning preformed metal particles, however,…

We demonstrate a novel route of spatially organizing the colloid arrangements on the polymer-grafted substrate by use of self-consistent field and density functional theories. We find that grafting of polymers onto a substrate can…

Spin coating is an out-of-equilibrium technique for producing polymer films and colloidal crystals quickly and reproducibly. In this review, we present an overview of theoretical and experimental studies of the spin coating of colloidal…

Colloids self-assemble into various organized superstructures determined by particle interactions. There is a tremendous progress in both the scientific understanding and applications of self-assemblies of single-type identical particles.…