Speedy ceramic sintering: Synthesizing ceramics can require heating for long times at high temperatures, making the screening of high-through-put materials challenging. C. Wang et al. developed a new ceramic-sintering technique that uses resistive heating of thin carbon strips to ramp up and ramp down temperature quickly. This method allows for the quick synthesis of a wide variety of ceramics while mitigating the loss of volatile elements. Ultrafast sintering is ideal for synthesizing many compositions to screen for ideal properties for a variety of applications, including the development of new solid-state electrolytes. Science , this issue p. 521

Advances in additive manufacturing techniques have enabled the creation of stimuli-responsive materials with designed three-dimensional (3D) architectures. Unlike biological systems in which functions such as sensing, actuation, and control are closely integrated, few architected materials have comparable system complexity. We report a design and manufacturing route to create a class of robotic metamaterials capable of motion with multiple degrees of freedom, amplification of strain in a prescribed direction in response to an electric field (and vice versa), and thus, programmed motions with self-sensing and feedback control. These robotic metamaterials consist of networks of piezoelectric, conductive, and structural elements interwoven into a designed 3D lattice. The resulting architected materials function as proprioceptive microrobots that actively sense and move.

The performance of ultrasonic transducers is largely determined by the piezoelectric properties and geometries of their active elements. Due to the brittle nature of piezoceramics, existing processing tools for piezoelectric elements only achieve simple geometries, including flat disks, cylinders, cubes and rings. While advances in additive manufacturing give rise to free-form fabrication of piezoceramics, the resultant transducers suffer from high porosity, weak piezoelectric responses, and limited geometrical flexibility. We introduce optimized piezoceramic printing and processing strategies to produce highly responsive piezoelectric microtransducers that operate at ultrasonic frequencies. The 3D printed dense piezoelectric elements achieve high piezoelectric coefficients and complex architectures. The resulting piezoelectric charge constant, d₃₃, and coupling factor, k_t, of the 3D printed piezoceramic reach 583 pC/N and 0.57, approaching the properties of pristine ceramics. The integrated printing of transducer packaging materials and 3D printed piezoceramics with microarchitectures create opportunities for miniaturized piezoelectric ultrasound transducers capable of acoustic focusing and localized cavitation within millimeter-sized channels, leading to miniaturized ultrasonic devices that enable a wide range of biomedical applications.

Elastic metamaterials possess band gaps, or frequency ranges that are forbidden to wave propagation. Existing solutions for impeding three-dimensional (3D) wave propagation largely rest on high-volume fractions of mass inclusions that induce and tailor negative effective density-based local resonances. This study introduces a class of elastic metamaterials that achieve low-frequency band gaps with a volume fraction as low as 3% (mass density as low as $0.034\mathrm{g}/{\mathrm{cm}}^3$). The working of the proposed design hinges on a 3D trampolinelike mode behavior that gives rise to wide, omnidirectional, and low-frequency band gaps for elastic waves despite very low-mass densities. Such a 3D trampoline effect is derived from a network of overhanging nodal microarchitectures that act as locally resonating elements, which give rise to band gaps at low frequencies. The dynamic effective properties of the metamaterial are numerically examined, which reveal that the band gap associated with the trampoline effect is resulted from a negative effective modulus coupled with a near-zero yet positive effective density. The experimental characterization is then made possible by fabricating the metamaterial via a light-based printing system that is capable of realizing microarchitectures with overhanging microfeatures. This design strategy could be useful to applications where simultaneous light weight and vibration control is desired.