A novel nacre-like metal/metal structure by lithography and electrodeposition

Taking a leaf out of Nature's book, the use of nacre-like structure in the materials synthesis has generated notable successes in creating novel structural composites but has yielded few practical advances in metals. Here we have successfully architected the intricate hierarchical microstructure, the brick-and-mortar structure, in metal/metal hybrids simply by deploying the coupling of lithographic method and electrodeposition technique, which allows the accurate control over the size, volume fraction and shape of the brick, amorphous Ni-P alloy or nanocrystalline Ni, and the formation of a fully interconnected mortar phase, ultrafine-grained Ni or Cu. Tensile testing results show that these innovative composites exhibit an enhanced crack-initiation fracture toughness, and their fracture behaviors have a strong dependency on the initial notch/crack orientation. Our work removes restrictions on the design and synthesis of the real nacre-like metal/metal structure, and provides a promising strategy for developing advanced metals by taking advantages of complex 3 demension brick-and-mortar structure and intricate interface architectures.