(45b) Additive Manufacturing of Hierarchical Porous Structures for Controlled Gas Bubble Flows Using Cellular Fluidics

Porous architectures are widespread in natural and industrial systems and are useful for facilitating mass transport across gas/liquid interfaces. Advances in additive manufacturing (AM) have enabled the fabrication of highly complex porous structures with unprecedented feature size control over large build areas. Cellular fluidics is an AM-based approach for controlling the gas/liquid interface in a heterogeneous lattice on a unit-cell-by-unit-cell basis. In this presentation, we explore the transport of gas bubbles in cellular fluidic structures that are predominantly saturated with a liquid phase. Deterministic channels for gas flow are maintained by tuning the orientation and thickness of the beams comprising each unit cell. The walls of each channel are open, with flows being directed by the surface tension-derived pressure barrier between the gas and liquid phases. This allows for targeted delivery of gas flows with a high degree of spatial control while maintaining large interfacial areas for gases to dissolve into and extract out of the liquid phase. We demonstrate the applicability for these systems for the absorption of CO₂ and O₂. Cellular fluidic channels are also constructed in COMSOL, and the simulated pressure barrier across the gas/liquid interface is validated against what is observed experimentally.