Ultralow Thermal Conductivity and Mechanical Resilience of Architected Nanolattices.

Creating materials that simultaneously possess ultralow thermal conductivity, high stiffness, and damage tolerance is challenging because thermal and mechanical properties are coupled in most fully dense and porous solids. Nanolattices can fill this void in the property space because of their hierarchical design and nanoscale features. We report that nanolattices composed of 24- to 182-nm-thick hollow alumina beams in the octet-truss architecture achieved thermal conductivities as low as 2 mW m K at room temperature while maintaining specific stiffnesses of 0.

Jumping-droplet-enhanced condensation on scalable superhydrophobic nanostructured surfaces.

When droplets coalesce on a superhydrophobic nanostructured surface, the resulting droplet can jump from the surface due to the release of excess surface energy. If designed properly, these superhydrophobic nanostructured surfaces can not only allow for easy droplet removal at micrometric length scales during condensation but also promise to enhance heat transfer performance. However, the rationale for the design of an ideal nanostructured surface as well as heat transfer experiments demonstrating the advantage of this jumping behavior are lacking.