Your Position:Prof. Tao XIE's Group > Home > News & Events
Ultrafast Digital Printing toward 4D Shape Changing Materials
Editor：group5 Date：2017-01-16 10:31:20 Hits:1706
The speed of the typical 3D printing processes is very low (on the order of hours) due to the layer-by-layer nature. In addition, material selection is quite limited due to the need to balance various properties of the printing precursors (e.g. viscosity). We deals with these several bottlenecks in 3D printing in a rather unexpected new way. In our current work, we simply used a commercial project to trigger visible light curing of commercial monomers with spatio-selective control of the curing degree. This built up highly control chemical and mechanical heterogeneity in a 2D film. Subsequent release of the stress arising from the heterogeity turns the film into a highly controlled 3D object. Overall, the concept has serveral unparelelled advantages over any existing technique: 1. Speed (30 sec versus hours); 3. Versatility: freedome to choose printing precursors and thus the diversity in terms of the printed materials; 3. Simplicity of the setup (a commercial projector and a reaction cell are sufficient). This paper titled Ultrafast Digital Printing toward 4D Shape Changing Materials (DOI: 10.1002/adma.201605390) was published in Adv. Mater. recently.