Scientists develop way to upsize nanostructures

Scientists develop way to upsize nanostructures into light, flexible 3-D printed materials: Virginia Tech, Livermore National Lab researchers develop hierarchical 3-D printed metallic materials
Blacksburg, VA | Posted on July 20th, 2016



Now, researchers led by Xiaoyu "Rayne" Zheng, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech have published a study in the journal Nature Materials that describes a new process to create lightweight, strong and super elastic 3-D printed metallic nanostructured materials with unprecedented scalability, a full seven orders of magnitude control of arbitrary 3-D architectures.


Related materials that can be produced at the nanoscale such as graphene sheets can be 100 times stronger than steel, but trying to upsize these materials in three dimensions degrades their strength eight orders of magnitude - in other words, they become 100 million times less strong.

http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=53710

....interesting development