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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…
Microfluidic chips provide unparalleled control over droplets and jets, which have advanced all natural sciences. However, microfluidic applications could be vastly expanded by increasing the per-channel throughput and directly exploiting…
Natural materials often feature a combination of soft and stiff phases, arranged to achieve excellent mechanical properties, such as high strength and toughness. Many natural materials have even independently evolved to have similar…
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,…
New additive manufacturing methods are needed to realize more complex soft robots. One example is soft fluidic robotics, which exploits fluidic power and stiffness gradients. Porous structures are an interesting type for this approach, as…
In many natural multi-layered composites, such as in the dactyl club of Stomatopods or the shell of bivalve mollusks, the defining functional and structural properties are determined by locally varying orientations of inorganic building…
Porous materials are relevant for a broad range of technologies from catalysis and filtration, to tissue engineering and lightweight structures. Controlling the porosity of these materials over multiple length scales often leads to enticing…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
Inertial fluid flow deformation around pillars in a microchannel is a new method for controlling fluid flow. Sequences of pillars have been shown to produce a rich phase space with a wide variety of flow transformations. Previous work has…
Non-equilibrium assembly, driven by fluxes controllable by continuous external energy inputs, enables dynamic and reconfigurable structures. Such controlled 3D assembly is desired for the design of adaptive materials that exploit…
While metals can be readily processed and reshaped by cold rolling, most bulk inorganic semiconductors are brittle materials that tend to fracture when plastically deformed. Manufacturing thin sheets and foils of inorganic semiconductors is…
Extrusion 3D-printing of biopolymers and natural fiber-based biocomposites allows for the fabrication of complex structures, ranging from gels for healthcare applications to eco-friendly structural materials. However, traditional polymer…
A framework is developed to allow emulsification to be used to fabricate functional structures from, and study the properties of, pristine layered nanosheets. Liquid-exfoliated few-layer graphene and MoS2 are demonstrated to stablize…
A key issue for the fabrication of scaffolds for tissue engineering is the development of processing techniques flexible enough to produce materials with a wide spectrum of solubility (bioresorption rates) and mechanical properties matching…
Periodic assemblies of nanoparticles are central to surface patterning, with applications in biosensing, energy conversion, and nanofabrication. Evaporation of colloidal droplets on substrates provides a simple yet effective route to…
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…
Solvent-based techniques usually involve preparing dilute blends of electron-donor and electron-acceptor materials dissolved in a volatile solvent. After some form of coating onto a substrate, the solvent evaporates. An initially…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
The computational prediction of the structure and stability of hybrid organic-inorganic interfaces provides important insights into the measurable properties of electronic thin film devices, coatings, and catalyst surfaces and plays an…
Silicon is an excellent material for microelectronics and integrated photonics with untapped potential for mid-IR optics. Despite broad recognition of the importance of the third dimension, current lithography methods do not allow…