A team of researchers from the University of Sheffield and Imperial College London have developed a new family of 3D-printed materials that they named meta-crystals.

The materials have a non-uniform, crystalline structure, making components built with them much stronger than those built using a standard uniform lattice structure. So much stronger, in fact, that they can withstand seven times the amount of energy compared to structures built with single-crystal structure lattice materials.

The extra strength comes from the random nature of the lattice in the meta-crystal material. With uniform lattice structures, force from any single direction ripples through the entire piece. The random lattice alignment in the new material, modeled after the atomic structure of a polycrystalline material, means that a crack in any direction is slowed down or stopped when it meets a crystal with differently aligned atoms. As 3D printing continues […]

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