Perspectives in 2025

Fatigue-induced failures remain a critical challenge to the performance and reliability of metals and alloys due to their inherently complex and unpredictable nature. This Perspective highlights emerging frontiers in fatigue research, including key mechanistic insights, material designs for improving fatigue resistance and advances in fabrication, characterization and modelling techniques.

Materials design and informatics have become increasingly prominent over the past several decades. Using the Materials Project as an example, this Perspective discusses how properties are calculated and curated, how this knowledge can be used for materials discovery, and the challenges in modelling complex material systems or managing software architecture.

Architected materials provide a pathway to achieve properties beyond those of monolithic materials. This Perspective discusses complex architecture designs and their fabrication, characterization and functions across length scales and timescales.

Anode-free batteries contain no active material at the negative electrode when manufactured, and this can enable them to have high energy density. This Perspective presents a critical overview of the mechanisms governing the behaviour of anode-free solid-state batteries and provides guidance to improve this type of battery.