Twinned nanoporous gold with enhanced tensile strength

Abstract Enhancing tensile strength is crucial to increasing the applicability of nanoporous materials including nanoporous gold (np-Au) that show mechanical weakness because of their nanoporous structure despite other superior characteristics. We fabricated twinned and textured np-Au foils with an average twin spacing of 7.9 nm. The foils exhibit an ultimate tensile strength (UTS) of 87.5 MPa when the loading axis is normal to the twin boundaries. This UTS value is approximately three times greater than that for np-Au with rare twins of 27.4 MPa. The high UTS can be ascribed to the twin boundaries acting as effective barriers to dislocation slip, resulting in the strain-hardening of the load-bearing ligaments.