PolyChemPrint: A hardware and software framework for benchtop additive manufacturing of functional polymeric materials

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM, 3D Printing) of hierarchical polymer structures for a targeted function represents a grand challenge in the field of polymer science and engineering. Because advanced functional materials often do not possess suitable mechanical and rheological properties for conventional fused deposition modeling, a key challenge that researchers face is in integrating custom deposition tool heads that enable printing of non-filamentary materials while preserving synchrony with the motion axes. In this article, we demonstrate a highly versatile hardware and software platform for melt and solutionphase benchtop AM and highlight patterning and post-deposition processing of

Materials Design of Highly Branched Bottlebrush Polymers at the Intersection of Modeling, Synthesis, Processing, and Characterization

“…Three recent reports highlight the sensitivity of the bottlebrush block copolymer microstructure, in terms of both domain size and orientation, to three distinct phenomena that arise during processing: (1) flow-driven structural reconfiguration; (2) kinetic trapping of metastable chain conformations during solution casting; , and (3) confinement effects in annealed thin films . Two more recent works also reveal a promising new approach for additive manufacturing that involves exploiting shear-induced disordering for tailored design of thixotropic inks for freeform fabrication of supersoft bottlebrush elastomers. , …”

“…319 These structural and corresponding color changes demonstrated the impact of steady flow on the self-assembled structure and physical properties of the sample (Figure 13B). 319 Patel et al 330,331 have recently used a modified 3D printer to achieve wide tunability of domain size and photonic band gap (reflected color) in lamella-forming poly(dimethylsiloxane)-bpoly(lactic acid) (PDMS−PLA) bottlebrush block copolymers during solution casting (Figure 13C). An ink solution was made by dissolving the bottlebrush block copolymer in a weakly selective good solvent, allowing for only weak lamellar ordering in the reservoir (domain spacing ∼ 160 nm).…”

Direct Laser Writing Crystal Polymorphs of Organic Semiconductors for Phase Change Electronics

“…Much like Blu-ray disks, the kinetic trapping of metastable polymorphs coupled with local heating from lasers offers an ideal platform for developing rewriteable organic electronic devices. For this operation, the open-source PolyChemPrint additive manufacturing tool previously reported by Patel and Diao et al offers a versatile hardware-agnostic platform to implement the laser writing technique (Figure a). Incorporating a laser diode (450 nm) for engraving, we custom-built a direct laser writing system that can exert precise control over the laser dosing to access local heating for inducing polymorphic transitions.…”

“…Through rapidly cooling of polymorph III to room temperature, we accessed a structurally distinct polymorph designated polymorph IV, with different electronic properties from polymorph III. On the basis of our custom-built PolyChemPrint three-dimensional (3D) printing platform, 22 we designed a direct laser writing setup which leverages laser heating to convert polymorph IV to polymorph I, thus changing the conductance by 2 orders of magnitude with no gating voltage necessary. Decoupling the phase transition from the voltage application allows for direct writing control while limiting relaxation from device operation.…”