CAREER: Intensifying multi-material additive manufacturing using advective assembly

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

Multi-material additive manufacturing incorporates multiple species within a single 3D-printed object to enhance its mechanical properties and functionality. This technology could bolster local manufacturing efforts and improve the resilience of supply chains. However, conventional layer-by-layer construction methods must operate at low volumetric throughputs to maintain fine feature resolution, limiting the number of objects that can be produced in a given time. To overcome this challenge, this project will design, fabricate, and test modular 3D printing nozzles engineered to structure multi-material composites rapidly before deposition. Achieving faster multi-material printing with higher resolution will open new avenues to product development and manufacturing in several sectors, including health care, electronic device fabrication, and food processing. Building local manufacturing infrastructure requires a dedicated user community as much as it requires new technologies. As such, a synergistic aim of this award is to empower engineering students to serve as science ambassadors and conduct outreach in the broader community. The proposed research will elucidate the maximal gains that can be achieved by advective assembly nozzles. Advective assemblers combine add, cut, and rotation junctions in particular sequences to enhance chaotic advection and align, multiply, and shrink co-flowing streamlines. The modular fluidic devices can extrude fine hierarchical architectures (e.g., dendritic trees and interdigitated electrodes) that can be tailored for specific additive manufacturing applications. However, it is unclear how architectures distort when the tortuous geometries are operated at high flow rates. This award will use experimental and computational tools to systematically study architecture fidelity as a function of three classes of independent variables: device geometry, ink rheology, and volumetric throughput. The results will elucidate the fundamental mechanics at work, the architectures that can be realized, the inks that can be processed, and the potential throughputs that can be achieved using advective assembly. 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.