Direct 4D printing via active composite materials

By Zhen Ding, Chao Yuan, Xirui Peng, Tiejun Wang, H. Jerry Qi, Martin L. Dunn. Science Advances, 2017

598 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A 4D printing method is developed where the shape of a 3D-printed part can change rapidly into a new permanent one by heating. We describe an approach to print composite polymers in high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) architectures that can be rapidly transformed to a new permanent configuration directly by heating. The permanent shape of a component results from the programmed time evolution of the printed shape upon heating via the design of the architecture and process parameters of a composite consisting of a glassy shape memory polymer and an elastomer that is programmed with a built-in compressive strain during photopolymerization. Upon heating, the shape memory polymer softens, releases the constraint on the strained elastomer, and allows the object to transform into a new permanent shape, which can then be reprogrammed into multiple subsequent shapes. Our key advance, the markedly simplified creation of high-resolution complex 3D reprogrammable structures, promises to enable myriad applications across domains, including medical technology, aerospace, and consumer products, and even suggests a new paradigm in product design, where components are simultaneously designed to inhabit multiple configurations during service.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5bbe54e7ab3dbb6bc71d287355670d8f7a25266d

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Citations in the corpus

Harnessing bistability for directional propulsion of soft, untethered robots (2018, background): “Future improvements of this technology could include the use of prestrained materials (34), reversible SMPs (37), or liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) (38, 39) in the muscles.”
Liquid crystal elastomers: an introduction and review of emerging technologies (2018, methodology): “ing methods include fused deposition modeling [143], in which a filament is laid down layer by layer to build up the printed part, and inkjet printing [138,140,144], in which droplets are jetted onto the print bed to create the part.”
Printing ferromagnetic domains for untethered fast-transforming soft materials (2018, background): “In the design and fabrication of shape-programmable soft materials, intensive efforts have been made to increase the level of complexity by adopting 3D printing techniques such as inkjet printing 27 , stereolithography 28,29 , and direct ink writing 30 .”