Phase 1 IUCRC at University of Connecticut: Center for Science of Heterogeneous Additive Printing of 3D Materials (SHAP3D)

University Of Connecticut, Storrs CT

Investigators

Abstract

The Center for Science of Heterogeneous Additive Printing of 3D Materials (SHAP3D) will serve the diverse interests of industry, government, and academia to address fundamental research challenges to meet the commercial needs of industry for heterogeneous 3D printing of materials. Additive manufacturing (AM) is viewed as a research area for global competitive advantage by industries such as automotive, medical, aerospace, and consumer products. SHAP3D aims to accelerate expansion and competitiveness of the domestic AM industry and its customers by addressing two critical market needs: (1) the growth of AM into more complex topologies, heterogeneous, and multi-functional applications that command high margins commensurate with their increased performance, and (2) the expansion of AM into lower margin industries via order-of-magnitude improvements in throughput, material-per-performance cost reductions, and ease-of-use design rules that enable SMEs and large companies to rapidly adopt advanced techniques. The Center will disseminate its design, material and process research to industrial members and practitioners, and the broader academic community. SHAP3D will provide a technically trained workforce, with industrial perspective, through the close collaboration between industry and academia. UCONN site's educational activities include summer programs for high school students and teachers, outreach to minority graduate students, and certificate programs in additive manufacturing. The SHAP3D research will be driven by the performance requirements of industry, built from a technical foundation of the fundamental structure-processing-property relationships associated with the voxel-level control and integration of diverse processes and materials. The enormous number of material combinations possible in these multi-material systems multiplied by the parameter space represented within processes with voxel-level state-variable control requires fundamental understanding of the material (constituents, fillers, interfaces) properties, processing protocols, and design rules to reliably predict the properties of products. Despite the diverse materials and process combinations, they are unified by many underlying physical principles related to melting, processing, and solidification, and interfacial physics for heterogeneous additive printing of materials. The Center will support members' choice of AM methods and research that encompasses numerous additive printing methods, such as fused filament fabrication (FFF), stereolithography/digital light processing (SLA/DLP), ink-jet, and other additive approaches. UCONN will leverage its strengths and will focus on three thrust areas: (i) automation, (ii) integrating polymers with non-polymers, and (iii) bio-printing. The Center and UCONN-site will add significant value for industry by addressing their vision to additively manufacture dissimilar materials into heterogeneous, valued-added products imbued with previously unattained biological, chemical, electrical, and mechanical functionality. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.