100th Anniversary of Macromolecular Science Viewpoint: Integrating Chemistry and Engineering to Enable Additive Manufacturing with High-Performance Polymers

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) with high-performance polymers (HPPs) represents simultaneously one of the most desirable and challenging feats in the AM arena. The very properties that make HPPs so attractive in a broad range of applications also make them nearly impossible to process using common AM equipment. Furthermore, when AM is achieved, it often brings the caveat of compromised mechanical properties of the final parts, in comparison with those made via injection molding. The demand to have advanced fabrication methods, rapid prototyping, and customization of parts while maintaining high performance in the finished products has inspired creative innovations that integrate chemical synthesis, materials science, mechanical engineering, and other fields into a multidisciplinary approach to advance AM with the seemingly "unprintable" HPPs. In this Viewpoint, we summarize several standout developments in the area and offer our perspective on future directions and challenges.

A brief review of mechanical designs for additive manufactured soft materials

“…Although there are already several review articles on additive manufactured soft materials in the literature, most of them are focused on novel material systems, advanced print strategies and the application of additive manufacturing in different fields [1,2,6,7,12,[22][23][24][25][26] . As discussed above, the significance of mechanical design arises concerning the accuracy, and reliability of additive manufactured soft materials.…”

Digital Light Processing 3D Printing of Enhanced Polymers via Interlayer Welding

“…[6][7][8][9][10][11] Polymers are widely used in these 3D printing techniques, in which layer-by-layer deposition is always performed to create 3D polymer objects. [12][13][14] However, the layer-by-layer processing DOI: 10.1002/marc.202200053 results in weak interlayer bonding or adhesion between layers, [15][16][17][18] resulting in the anisotropic mechanical properties of the printed products.…”

Additively manufactured short carbon fiber reinforced polyetheretherketone by coating polyetherimide at the interface using fused filament fabrication

“…Additive Manufacturing (AM), routinely known as 3D printing or rapid prototyping, is an emerging technology followed the guideline of layer-by-layer construction, which enables fabrication of ceramic, metallic and polymeric parts with a variety of shapes and sizes. 1,2 Compared with other conventional manufacturing methods, AM possesses a large number of advantages, including building complicated geometries, highly tailored and individual flexible production, economical and environment-protecting fabrication process, reducing the operation cost of supply chain, shortening the design-producing period and making designers research new methods freely. 3,4 The major methods of AM techniques contain selective laser sintering (SLS), 5 laminated object manufacturing (LOM), 6 stereolithography apparatus (SLA) 7 and fused filament fabrication (FFF).…”

“…9,10 During the FFF-fabricating process, the polymer filament can be continuously fed into a heated nozzle for convert to semiliquid state and subsequently deposited over a heated bed layer by layer and a variety of structures of polymers can be accurate fabrication by the computer-aided design (CAD) or animation modeling software controlling the machine. 11 Recently, many types of thermoplastic polymers are utilized as feedstocks in the process of FFF, such as polylactic acid (PLA), 12 acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS), 13 poly (ether imide) (PEI), 1 polyphenylene sulfide (PPS), 14 polypropylene (PP) 15 and polyether ether ketone (PEEK). 16 It is generally known that engineering plastics play an important role for structural applications, especially in consideration of substituting light alloys since they exhibit good specific mechanical properties.…”