All-printed smart structures: a viable option?

Abstract

The last two decades have seen evolution of smart materials and structures technologies from theoretical concepts to physical realization in many engineering fields. These include smart sensors and actuators, active damping and vibration control, biomimetics, and structural health monitoring. Recently, additive manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing and printed electronics have received attention as methods to produce 3D objects or electronic components for prototyping or distributed manufacturing purposes. In this paper, the viability of manufacturing all-printed smart structures, with embedded sensors and actuators, will be investigated. To this end, the current 3D printing and printed electronics technologies will be reviewed first. Then, the plausibility of combining these two different additive manufacturing technologies to create all-printed smart structures will be discussed. Potential applications for this type of all-printed smart structures include most of the traditional smart structures where sensors and actuators are embedded or bonded to the structures to measure structural response and cause desired static and dynamic changes in the structure.

Dynamic Measurements Using FDM 3D-Printed Embedded Strain Sensors

“…3D-printed smart structures and intelligent systems have recently attracted significant research interest [1,2,3]. Smart structures are based on their ability to change themselves under environmental and inherent variations [4]; therefore, a dynamic nature is intrinsic [5].…”

Additive Manufacturing of Materials: Viable Techniques, Metals, Advances, Advantages, and Applications

“…Figure 5.13 shows hybrid sensor platforms with printed, embedded, or bonded sensors, actuators, microprocessors, communication components, energy harvester devices, and signal-processing circuitry that are enabling new applications with capabilities extending beyond the scope of conventional materials and integration approaches. [122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133] Embedded sensors in 3D custom-shaped structures and packaging configurations enabled by additive manufacturing and printed electronics offer continuous monitoring, significantly impacting the productivity, reliability, and safety aspects critical for technology integration. Passive conductive structures including circuit layouts and interconnect structures can be printed conformally on the substrate of interest and post-processed to achieve the desired functionality.…”

Study on barium titanate and graphene reinforced PVDF matrix for 4D applications

“…Additive manufacturing (AM) is a vastly growing manufacturing technique with numerous applications in different fields such as medical implants, especially in dentistry for the fabrication of dentures, 1 –3 bridges, and crowns; tissue engineering for 3-D tissue fabrication; electronics for fabrication of sensors; and jewelry of complex design. 4 –6 In the last two decades, large numbers of innovations with respect to printers, raw materials, and types of processes have been made in this sector. 7 The 4-D printing or smart manufacturing is also an innovative technique in this context.…”