This project will exploit a new “joined up” understanding of plastic deformation to design smart, ‘length-scale engineered’ materials that have increased strength, adequate ductility/toughness for safe use, and self-healing properties. It will produce nano-enabled materials using a new, safer, additive manufacturing route, and design rules for more sustainable, safer (higher performance/lifetime in harsh environments) and energy efficient components (reducing weight for equal strength). The ultimate strength of a material comes from the chemical bonds that hold it together. Like a zip fastener, it is hard to pull the zip apart (break the bonds) all at once. However, materials have very small defects (“dislocations”), which can move easily through the material, sequentially breaking individual bonds (like a zip unfastening) to generate permanent deformation (plasticity). Thus, materials are generally very much weaker than their theoretical strength. Industrial trial and error has found that introducing different atom sizes, particles, crystal boundaries and plastic work, can all increase the strength of a material. Even test-size affects the measured material response; “smaller is stronger”. Recent research has found a way to combine these effects to predict the strength of crystalline materials. ‘Strength is driven by length’; the average distance between different constraints on dislocation source size and motion. A ten-fold increase in strength can be achieved by engineering nano-scale lengths into materials. Safe exploitation requires a realistic, controllable manufacturing route and an understanding of the link between the novel microstructures and compositions possible and their resultant material properties. The project, therefore, has two parallel paths: 1) developing electrochemical deposition to manufacture and test a series of designed, layered microstructures; 2) atomic scale simulations and kinetic Monte Carlo models of similar structures, compared and validated against experimental data. Electro-chemical deposition is able to deposit materials with controllably small microstructure in bulk or multilayer layer form. Process parameters can be adjusted to allow tuning and spatial variation of both elastic and plastic local properties in a single-piece part. This will be used to produce smart materials designed to: - manage/relieve residual stress build up - have stable performance at high temperatures - heal radiation damage and/or accumulated cold work to restore ductility and prevent brittle fracture without loss of strength. Modelling will study the effect of local, chemically-sharp interfaces on defect production, migration and destruction in bulk media. Both point defects, (e.g. from thermal ageing or radiation exposure) and extended defects (e.g. dislocations) will be studied. Simulations will rapidly explore the performance of this new class of materials to provide indications of long term behaviour in real engineering applications.