Design and additive manufacturing of alveolar-inspired metallic porous structures via Organic-Coordination Precursor Stereolithography

Design and additive manufacturing of multiscale metallic porous structures remain challenging because achieving complex geometries with high structural fidelity after metal conversion is difficult. Herein, an Alveolar-Inspired Multiscale Topology Evolution (AMTE) strategy and an Organic-Coordination Precursor Stereolithography (OCPS) route are combined to fabricate alveolar-inspired metallic porous structures. AMTE employs a Sigmoid-weighted nonlinear field to generate smooth transitions between Schwarz-P units with different periodicities, producing Alveolar-Inspired Multiscale Topological Structures (AMTS) with macroscale framework and microscale hierarchical channels. Organic-coordination metal salts are formulated into photocurable precursor slurries for digital light processing (DLP) printing. Optimised 70 wt% slurry maintains stability for 240 h, and the precursors decompose at 150–400 °C, enabling controlled conversion into metallic AMTS. After staged thermal conversion, the metallic AMTS retains post-sintering layerwise features at the ∼10 μm scale, approximately one order of magnitude smaller than typical feature sizes for conventional powder bed fusion processes. Optimal Ni0.75Fe0.25-AMTS achieves a plateau stress of 47.63 MPa, an energy absorption of 21.55 MJ m−3, and enhanced gas–liquid interfacial behaviour. It exhibits superhydrophilicity, underwater superaerophobicity, rapid bubble release, and a 42.2% lower overpotential than commercial nickel foam under identical conditions. This work provides a design-to-fabrication strategy for functional metallic porous structures.