(191c) Polymer Additive Manufacturing: Hype, Reality, Fundamentals, and the Future

Polymer additive manufacturing (AM) is a transformative technology, which has already shortened the design-build-test cycle, enabled manufacturing of complex structures that could not previously be manufactured, and created new functionalities across a range of application areas. However, polymer AM is not a panacea; there are many use cases for which traditional manufacturing offers distinct advantages, and, given the complexity and customization that polymer AM excels at, it is not surprising that reliability and reproducibility can be challenging to achieve. My research group became interested in AM first as a tool (for printing custom fixtures) almost a decade ago, but we quickly realized that AM offered an incredible testbed for understanding how polymers behave at extremes (e.g., rapid heating and cooling rates, numerous interfaces, highly filled composites).

This talk will focus on the polymer AM methods that my group uses: material extrusion and vat photopolymerization. The bulk of this talk will discuss our investigations of the effects of material selection and assembly conditions in polymer AM on resulting physical and mechanical properties using both experimental and computational techniques. This will include thermal modeling across size scales and at different levels of computational, material, and part complexity; AM of highly filled composites and other new feedstocks; and predicting and tailoring mechanical properties of additively manufactured structures. The talk will conclude with description of recent work using machine learning to classify and predict properties of printed structures, and will also offer thoughts on future directions in polymer AM.