Recent Advances in 3D Printing of Structured Materials for Adsorption and Catalysis Applications

Abstract

Porous solids in the form of adsorbents and catalysts play a crucial role in various industrially important chemical, energy, and environmental processes. Formulating them into structured configurations is a key step toward their scale up and successful implementation at the industrial level. Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, has emerged as an invaluable platform for shape engineering porous solids and fabricating scalable configurations for use in a wide variety of separation and reaction applications. However, formulating porous materials into self-standing configurations can dramatically affect their performance and consequently the efficiency of the process wherein they operate. Toward this end, various research groups around the world have investigated the formulation of porous adsorbents and catalysts into structured scaffolds with complex geometries that not only exhibit comparable or improved performance to that of their powder parents but also address the pressure drop and attrition issues of traditional configurations. In this comprehensive review, we summarize the recent advances and current challenges in the field of adsorption and catalysis to better guide the future directions in shape engineering solid materials with a better control on composition, structure, and properties of 3D-printed adsorbents and catalysts.

Recent Advances in the Development of Highly Conductive Structured Supports for the Intensification of Non-adiabatic Gas-Solid Catalytic Processes: The Methane Steam Reforming Case Study

“…The recent advances in additive manufacturing technologies paved the way as well to a new generation of structured supports, namely periodic open cellular structures (POCS) (Lawson et al, 2021). The building block of the structure consists in a unit cell with well-defined three-dimensional geometry (Figure 3A), which is periodically repeated in space to form a self-standing ordered object.…”

Promising Sustainable Models Toward Water, Air, and Solid Sustainable Management in the View of SDGs

“…This strategy opens ways toward the synthesis of multifunctional membranes where biomass-derived polymers have the ability to selectively and effectively separate organic pollutant from water and the photocatalyst nanoparticles can interact with and degrade a wide range of pollutants under solar light with superior antifouling property (Zhang et al 2021a). Another scalable technique such as additive manufacturing or 3D printing has emerged as a valuable platform for fabricating scalable configurations and shape engineering porous materials with broad applications in the field of catalysis and separation (Lawson et al 2021). Through 3D technology, we can control the scaffold geometry with complex structures of the solid-state materials (cell density, channel size, and wall thickness), material physiochemical properties (mechanical strength, active site density, and hierarchal porosity), and ink rheology (material loading, solvent retention, and shear behavior).…”

“…Through 3D technology, we can control the scaffold geometry with complex structures of the solid-state materials (cell density, channel size, and wall thickness), material physiochemical properties (mechanical strength, active site density, and hierarchal porosity), and ink rheology (material loading, solvent retention, and shear behavior). Moreover, this technology enables scalable and cost-effective production and is affordable to people and communities with confined resources (Zheng et al 2020;Lawson et al 2021). Employing the 3D printing inks synthesized from the biomass-hybrid photocatalysts or slurry photocatalysts for the design and manufacturing of complex architected materials according to the purpose opens a wide variety of applications with lasting performance.…”

Monolithic Stirrer Reactors for the Sustainable Production of Dihydroxybenzenes over 3D Printed Fe/γ-Al2O3 Monoliths: Kinetic Modeling and CFD Simulation

“…The additive manufacturing (AM), or three-dimensional (3D) printing technology, has been parallel developed to the MSR [15] in different sectors including aerospace, aeronautics and defense, medicine and healthcare, construction and chemical industry [15,16]. Currently, AM is shown as an efficient and sustainable tool for manufacturing novel catalysts and reactors [17][18][19][20][21][22]. In particular, the fabrication of 3D monolithic catalysts by using inks with catalytic materials, which implies that the catalytic active phase is included in the ink formulation, is a reality, and it has been demonstrated in liquid [23][24][25] and particularly in gas phase reactions [26][27][28].…”