China News Service, Hefei, February 3rd (Reporter Wu Lan) The reporter learned from the University of Science and Technology of China on the 3rd that Li Mujun, an associate professor of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Equipment, School of Engineering Science, Wang Liu, a special professor of the Department of Modern Mechanics, and a professor at the University of Southern California In collaboration with Yong Chen, ink direct-write (DIW) printing on thermoset materials with various rheological properties and functional properties has been successfully realized.
Relevant research results were recently published in Nature Communications.
Thermosetting materials form a three-dimensional space network structure after crosslinking, which has very excellent mechanical properties and stability.
In recent years, thermoset materials have played an increasingly important role in fields such as soft robots and flexible electronics.
New types of soft robots have higher requirements for complex structures and functions, and it is of great significance to develop a simple, universal, and cheap thermosetting material manufacturing method for them.
However, 3D printing of thermosetting materials still has many limitations, such as curing principle, rheology of materials, and molding efficiency.
In this work, the researchers proposed a dual heating method through the rapid heating of the adjacent layer and the heating of the Joule heater, so that the representative thermosetting material Sylgard184 can be cured within 2s at the fastest, thus successfully realizing the unmodified low viscosity Sylgard184 Direct 3D printing, the mechanical properties of the printed structure are similar to those of the die-cast structure.
By employing nozzles of different diameters, the size scalability of the method was verified, achieving a maximum print height of 120 mm and a resolution of 50 μm.
This work also demonstrates the rich functionality of in situ dual heating (ISDH) printing.
By combining with the "pick-and-place" process, ISDH printing can also make flexible electronic devices.
These results indicate that ISDH printing has a broad application space in the emerging fields of soft robotics and flexible electronics.