(321a) Additive Manufacturing of Carbons from Commodity Plastics

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is an essential technology revolutionizing how modern manufacturing is approached. Many industries, from medicine to aerospace, are adopting AM to take advantage of its modularity and ease of customization. The application space for AM broadens the need to expand the material design space for AM also grows. While new industrially viable materials systems and AM techniques are rapidly emerging for polymers, metals and composites, this new wave of technology has yet to fully extend to carbon materials. This is despite the exemplary properties of carbon materials and the crucial role they play as additives, fibers, and porous materials in a wide range of applications. Current approaches to perform AM using carbon utilize either highly filled slurries of carbon additives and solvent or polymeric materials that can be pyrolyzed to yield carbon. Despite marked progress in this area, most systems experience challenges with cost, scalability, and dimensional control of the final carbon product. This work seeks to address some of these challenges and establish a scalable and cost-effective way to produce complex, three-dimensional structured carbon materials with good dimensional accuracy. Particularly, it is found that dimensionally accurate structured carbons can be achieved using commercially available materials systems in conjunction with widely available and well understood AM technology.