There is an ever-growing push toward sustainability and green manufacturing in a wide array of industries, especially 3D printing, which is now recognized as a viable manufacturing method. The number of studies focusing on leveraging additive manufacturing of natural products continues to grow, with key areas of interest including exciting chemistries or modifications of natural products toward 3D printable materials, advancements in prototypes or products by changing feedstocks to green or bioderived alternatives, and the introduction of added functionalities or properties. This includes concepts such as processing natural or bioderived polymers into filament for extrusion-based 3D printing, the design of photopolymer resins and inks for vat photopolymerizations, jet printing, or direct ink writing processes, and the use of powders for selective laser sintering. The strategies employed to achieve materials suitable for 3D printing, the physical properties of the materials, and the resultant applications including strengths and limitations, will be explored in this review. Overall, the advancements in the field are leading to future opportunities in biomaterials and medical devices, electronics and batteries, and environmental remediation and water purification.
Oil spills in aquatic environments represent a significant ongoing threat to aquatic life due to the persistence of oil films or slick. While many methods are available for open ocean waterways, interior waterways represent a different set of challenges. To that end, we propose the use of poly(β-hydroxythioether) (PBHTE) shape memory polymer foams as a highly porous, low density solid for environmental remediation through oil collection. PBHTE foams are produced through thiol-epoxy "click" reactions in the presence of an organobase, with gas blown foaming producing the highly porous scaffold with tunable pore sizes and salt-leaching yielding smaller pore sizes ($400 μm).The different porosities are used here for studying the oil sorption as functions of time and environmental temperature for different pore sizes and compositions. The PBHTE material demonstrated two different T g s when dry versus wet to compare against environmental differences. While dry the foam showed a T g of 51.5 C and conversely when wet the T g was at 25 C. The foams were compared to see how the pore size will affect the oil sorption of the material and how it can be optimized for oil spills in interior water ways. The pore sizes analyzed were 400 μm, 800 μm, and 1100 μm. The relationship of pore size, temperature of the oil system during sorption, and time in the oil system seemed to have the largest impact on the sorption of oil during this study. The peak conditions for maximum oil sorption yielded the best performer being the 800 μm foam at 10 C after 15 h of sorption yielding a 2250% sorption, comparable with graphene and other low density sorption materials. Ultimately, the role of density in scavenging, along with a literature review, is used to assemble a density vs sorption Ashby chart to provide insight into the different materials available for such environmental remediation. In this context, PBHTE foams represent a new, promising class of material capable of absorbing oil in aquatic environments.
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