Additive Manufacturing of Multimaterial Composites for Radiation Shielding and Thermal Management

Abstract

The harsh radiation environment of space induces the degradation and malfunctioning of electronic systems. Current approaches for protecting these microelectronic devices are generally limited to attenuating a single type of radiation or require only selecting components that have undergone the intensive and expensive process to be radiation-hardened by design. Herein, we describe an alternative fabrication strategy to manufacture multimaterial radiation shielding via direct ink writing of custom tungsten and boron nitride composites. The additively manufactured shields were shown to be capable of attenuating multiple species of radiation by tailoring the composition and architecture of the printed composite materials. The shear-induced alignment during the printing process of the anisotropic boron nitride flakes provided a facile method for introducing favorable thermal management characteristics to the shields. This generalized method offers a promising approach for protecting commercially available microelectronic systems from radiation damage and we anticipate this will vastly enhance the capabilities of future satellites and space systems.

Digital light processing based multimaterial 3D printing: challenges, solutions and perspectives

“…The multimaterial (MM) 3D printing capability can greatly enrich the performance and functionality of printed 3D objects and even realize the performance and functionality which do not exist in the structures printed with one single material. As presented in figure 1, up to now, the MM 3D printing capability has been implemented to various mainstream 3D printing technologies such as fused deposition modeling (FDM) [2][3][4][5][6][7][8], direct ink writing (DIW) [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], inkjet [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], as well as digital light processing (DLP) [30][31][32][33][34].…”