Additive Manufacturing: Unlocking the Evolution of Energy Materials

Abstract

The global energy infrastructure is undergoing a drastic transformation towards renewable energy, posing huge challenges on the energy materials research, development and manufacturing. Additive manufacturing has shown its promise to change the way how future energy system can be designed and delivered. It offers capability in manufacturing complex 3D structures, with near‐complete design freedom and high sustainability due to minimal use of materials and toxic chemicals. Recent literatures have reported that additive manufacturing could unlock the evolution of energy materials and chemistries with unprecedented performance in the way that could never be achieved by conventional manufacturing techniques. This comprehensive review will fill the gap in communicating on recent breakthroughs in additive manufacturing for energy material and device applications. It will underpin the discoveries on what 3D functional energy structures can be created without design constraints, which bespoke energy materials could be additively manufactured with customised solutions, and how the additively manufactured devices could be integrated into energy systems. This review will also highlight emerging and important applications in energy additive manufacturing, including fuel cells, batteries, hydrogen, solar cell as well as carbon capture and storage.

Recent Progress in Biomimetic Additive Manufacturing Technology: From Materials to Functional Structures

“…Robotic placement of components and complementary techniques, such as micromachining, dispensing of functional inks, and embedding of wires, could also be combined with 3D‐printing processes. Such integration could provide increased control of multiple materials, geometric scales, and functionalities in 3D‐printed structures . As another example, 3D printing incorporated with freeze–drying has been reported for the fabrication of graphene aerogel with excellent mechanical and electrical properties .…”

“…From craftsmanship to mass production, many believe the future of manufacturing lies in mass customization to which AM may present an effective solution . According to the American Society for Testing and Materials (ISO/ASTM 52900:2015) there are over 50 different AM technologies that can be classified into seven different categories: binder jetting, material jetting, material extrusion, vat photo‐polymerization, powder bed fusion, energy deposition, and sheet lamination . Other ways to distinguish these technologies are to group them by the physical state of raw materials (i.e., liquid, solid, or powder form) and by the methods that are used to fuse the raw materials together (e.g., thermal, ultraviolet (UV) light, laser, or electron beam) .…”

Manufactured chemistry: Rethinking unit operation design in the age of additive manufacturing

“…The main commonality of all of these approaches is that their designs are generated through computer‐aided design (CAD) software and then cross‐sectional slices are generated normal to the direction of the layer‐by‐layer build. Research and development in additive manufacturing has exploded in recent years and there are currently more than fifty different ASTM recognized AM technologies commercially available or under development . These technologies can be classified by their process type (see Table ).…”

3D‐Printed MOF‐Derived Hierarchically Porous Frameworks for Practical High‐Energy Density Li–O2 Batteries

“…Based on the above mentioned considerations, developing a self‐standing catalyst material with proper porous framework is an effective approach to enhance the electrode capacity and the practical specific energy density of the cells (Figure c) . Recently, additive manufacturing or 3D printing has shown a great potential in manufacturing of novel designs for energy materials and devices, as it can directly produce certain complex 3D architecture, despite the considerable challenge in terms of the refined feature resolutions …”