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The correlation of a material's structure with its properties is one of the important unresolved issues in materials science research. This paper discusses a novel experimental and computational approach by which the influence of the pores on the mechanical properties of bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) can be systematically and quantitatively analyzed. The experimental stage involves the fabrication of a template whose pore configurations are pre-determined by computer-aided design tools, and replication of the designed patterns with BMGs. Quasi-static mechanical characterization of these complex microstructures is conducted under uniaxial tension and in-plane compression. For the numerical simulations, a non-local gradient-enhanced continuum mechanical model is established, using thermodynamic principles and periodic boundary conditions. The combination of the experimental and numerical results has identified the importance of the pore configuration, overall porosity and diameter to the spacing ratio of the pores to attain optimized material properties.

Recent progress has put the spotlight on functional nanoparticles encapsulated inside hollow silica nanospheres as socalled catalytic nanoreactors for various reactions. However, the synthetic methods used so far vary from one nanoparticle system to another, not providing access to the synthesis of a large variety of such materials. Here, we report an alternative, namely, a coordination-enhanced synthesis leading to a single system, which can directly produce a vast number of different hollow mesoporous silica nanoreactors with metal or metal-oxide nanoparticles inside their cavities (M@HMSNs or M x O y @HMSNs, where M stands for the chosen metal). We have successfully used the method with more than 21 different metals (Ru,

Dental enamel is a highly anisotropic and heterogeneous material, which exhibits an optimal reliability with respect to the various loads occurring over years. In this work, enamel's microstructure of parallel aligned rods of mineral fibers is modeled and mechanical properties are evaluated in terms of strength and toughness with the help of a multiscale modeling method. The established model is validated by comparing it with the stress-strain curves identified by microcantilever beam experiments extracted from these rods. Moreover, in order to gain further insight in the damage-tolerant behavior of enamel, the size of crystallites below which the structure becomes insensitive to flaws is studied by a microstructural finite element model. The assumption regarding the fiber strength is verified by a numerical study leading to accordance of fiber size and flaw tolerance size, and the debonding strength is estimated by optimizing the failure behavior of the microstructure on the hierarchical level above the individual fibers. Based on these well-grounded properties, the material behavior is predicted well by homogenization of a representative unit cell including damage, taking imperfections (like microcracks in the present case) into account.