Hollow-walled metamaterials: Unifying mechanical resilience and biointegration through continuous curvature
• Merges minimal-surface (TPMS) with hollow walls to unify strength–toughness demands. • Doubles energy absorption vs. top lattices by redistributing stress uniformly. • Achieves bone-mimetic stiffness and >270 MPa strength, surpassing cortical standards. • Expands surface area by 80%, boosting osteoblast proliferation and metabolic activity. Conventional lattice materials for load-bearing implants often struggle to combine high strength, stable failure modes, and effective biointegration, a challenge rooted in their discontinuous geometries and stress-concentrating nodal junctions. Here, we introduce hollow-walled triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) metamaterials, a biomimetic architecture that merges the continuous curvature of minimal surfaces with engineered voids to overcome these limitations. Unlike prior hollow-strut designs prone to powder occlusion and stress localization, our Ti–6Al–4V lattices, fabricated through a single-step Boolean subtraction strategy, eliminate nodal stress risers while retaining open, interconnected channels. As a result, these structures achieve compressive strengths exceeding 270 MPa, surpassing cortical bone benchmarks, and specific energy absorption of 32 J g −1 —twice that of state-of-the-art lattices—enabled by progressive layer-by-layer buckling that prevents catastrophic collapse. In parallel, the hollow-walled design amplifies surface area by 80 %, driving 66 % greater human fibroblast proliferation and 40 % higher metabolic activity compared to solid TPMS scaffolds. By unifying mechanical resilience with biofunctional efficacy through geometry-driven innovation, this work presents a versatile design paradigm for next-generation implants, aerospace systems, and multifunctional metamaterials.
Authors
- Qiyang Tan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2447-7586)
- Fanshuo Wang
- Zhuoyang Xin
- Deniz U. Erbulut (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5700-3515)
- Mingxing Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8363-6968)
- Yiwei Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5086-9433)
- Chun Xu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3517-8963)
- Anh Ly
Institutions
- The University of Sydney (AU)
- The University of Queensland (AU)
- Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital (AU)
- Sydney Dental Hospital (AU)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Materials & Design
- Published
- 2025-07-21
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matdes.2025.114429
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Cellular and Composite Structures
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.71
Funders
- Australian Research Council