“The strategies we developed have helped to make nanostructured materials more attractive for structural applications.”

Understanding the deformation mechanisms of nanostructured materials and thereby enhancing their mechanical properties is currently an important subject of intensive research within the nano-community. Our paper represents an effort towards that goal.

Yes, we demonstrated three strategies that help enhance the tensile ductility of nanostructured materials while simultaneously maintaining their high strength. These strategies have been proven to be both effective and practical in the design of high-performance nanostructured materials. Many research groups have now adopted similar strategies in order to reap the benefits of this nanostructuring and hence to achieve attractive mechanical properties.

Bulk nanostructured materials are known to have high strength compared with their coarse-grained counterparts. However, these nanostructured materials lack the capability to resist the tensile plastic deformation, which severely limits their practical utilities. Our work is among the first efforts to develop useful strategies to overcome this major bottleneck. The strategies we developed have helped to make nanostructured materials more attractive for use in structural applications.

To explore the novel properties of nanostructured materials by controlling their nanoscale microstructures has been a long-standing research interest of mine. I’m thankful to Professor En (Evan) Ma of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Materials Science & Engineering and also to the Nanoscale Synthesis and Characterization Lab at LLNL for providing me with the opportunities to continue my research towards that direction.