Architected cellular materials—from open-cell foams to sheet-based lattices—are attracting significant interest because their properties are dictated primarily by geometry rather than by bulk chemistry. Thanks to advances in additive manufacturing, these materials are transitioning into commercial applications in fields such as biomedicine and personal protective equipment. However, brittle fracture in lattice-based systems remains a critical challenge, underscoring the need for innovative design strategies and alternative fabrication methods. Traditional designs have often drawn inspiration from natural patterns or crystalline structures, but emerging approaches to unit cell innovation demand further exploration to fully leverage this paradigm.
One promising strategy exploits the unique behavior of thermotropic liquid crystals and their networks of defects, known as disclination lines. Liquid crystals uniquely combine the long-range orientational order of solids with the fluidity and sensitivity to confinement characteristic of liquids. Under varying temperature fields and confinement conditions, their mesogenic molecules self-assemble into mesostructures that pack into cubic arrangements with periodicities on the order of hundreds of nanometers. While these disclination architectures have been extensively studied for their optical properties, their mechanical characteristics remain largely unexplored.
In this work, we employ Landau–de Gennes simulations coupled with Finite Element Analysis to predict a range of disclination textures formed under diverse nanoscale conditions and to elucidate how their architectural features contribute to mechanical performance. We then upscale these nanometer-scale architectures to macroscopic (millimeter-scale) structures and fabricate them via stereolithography to experimentally validate their responses under compression. Notably, the bicontinuous, interpenetrating double diamond lattice exhibits promising structural attributes; its smooth nodal curvature and interwoven network foster toughening mechanisms absent in conventional lattice topologies. Furthermore, our simulations demonstrate that carefully thresholding the local degree of molecular ordering allows us to tune the lattice void fraction (or relative density) and, in turn, adjust the structural response. Additionally, surface anchoring effects induce strain that alters the unit cell geometry, enabling directional tuning of the mechanical properties. These liquid crystal–derived features introduce new adjustable parameters, thereby expanding the design space for architected materials.
