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LLNL’s Sustainability and Polymer Additive Manufacturing

LLNL polymer and materials scientists have the state-of-the-art equipment and facilities needed to tackle the challenges in making the next generation of polymers using 3D printing. Watch this video to see some of the techniques, types of printing methods, and current targets for sustainable, recyclable, and reusable crosslinked thermoset polymer materials.

Topics:
3D Printing & Additive Manufacturing Materials Medical

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 hi I'm Joanna Schwartz I'm a postdoctoral researcher here at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and a polymer chemist I do a lot of work with 3D printing and making the next generation of polymeric materials such as this cute little guy and in general I work with a lot of different additive manufacturing processes light volumetric additive manufacturing as you see here

    00:00:19 my name is Maggie metriessa and I'm a polymer chemist not only do I care about polymer but their impact on the environment I work a lot with air gels and material that could decompose after we are done with them so these are great insulator and we could use them as Windows as well for space but when we're done with them we could actually degrade them by using a strong base and taking

    00:00:43 them back to their monomer hey everyone my name is Joshua I'm a polymer campus here at the Lawrence deliver mall I work a lot with lots 3D printing materials so my goal is to make a sustainable and recycled boss 3D materials hey welcome to the advanced manufacturing lab here at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in general here we work with many

    00:01:07 different types of materials from polymers to Ceramics and metals as a polymer chemist I work here in this Wet Side lab where we work with mainly polymer materials and additive manufacturing processes like melt material Extrusion stair lithographic Printing and Next Generation processes like volumetric additive Manufacturing

    00:01:27 in particular Maggie City and I we all work heavily in additive manufacturing or 3D printing to change the way we design structures in the world around us there are many different types of 3D printing and each of these requires a different type of materials including melt material Extrusion where we use heat to melt thermoplastic filament or linear polymer and extrude it out of a

    00:01:48 nozzle onto a build surface rastering that material around in a layer by layer process building structures up that way direct ink right where instead of a thermoplastic solid filament we use gels or pastes and there we can extrude materials and what's really interesting about direct ink right is we can have Composite Materials including Ceramics metal powders silica particles all

    00:02:11 incorporated into resins that can be freestanding gels or cross-length and cured through thermal or photo methods lastly there's photo based methods solely such as ster lithography two Photon polymerization and volumetric additive Manufacturing these photo based methods are exciting as the polymerization chemistry happens directly during the printing process

    00:02:39 chemists and material scientists can dictate the properties of these printed Parts simply by changing the resin and the monomers and additives incorporated into that resin during the printing in order to make the Next Generation materials we first need to synthesize them thankfully here at Lawrence Livermore National Lab we have a number of people capable of doing that and so

    00:03:02 we make the Next Generation materials from the monomer to make the polymers that we can eventually 3D print once we print materials we need to be able to characterize them that includes Metrology Imaging and mechanical characterization among many other capabilities in this case we need to have this equipment here so that we can readily

    00:03:21 make materials print them and characterize them all within the same facility as we make materials and resins we need to be able to characterize their properties we use instruments like this the 4A transform infrared spectroscopy or ftir to measure the chemical composition of those materials in addition to their chemical composition

    00:03:42 we need to understand their viscosity their printability the bulk curing kinetics that uses instruments like photoreology or rheology as well as particle size analysis we need to be able to take images of our materials and how they react as well as understand their thermal properties through characterization techniques like Dynamic scanning calorimetry or DSC

    00:04:06 and lastly you know if we have these parts we want to be able to characterize their mechanical properties as well and so we use instruments like this Dynamic mechanical analysis or dma or Instagram testing to then take these samples that we've printed or made and characterize them mechanically the downside of 3D printing as you can clearly see is you produce a lot of

    00:04:27 waste in terms of melt material Extrusion in principle you could take this you could melt it down and use standard thermal mechanical recycling to recover this material when the case of stair lithographic methods where you photocure the object you create a permanent thermal set and in this case it's cross length there's no melting it there's no breaking it down there's no

    00:04:48 recovering that material and so this waste is permanent and non-recyclable and not sustainable and so so really fundamentally to make the next generation of 3D printing materials we need to make recoverable sustainable depolymerizable stereo lithographic cured resins for this reason Maggie CG and myself are part of multiple teams here at Lawrence

    00:05:10 Livermore National Lab working to create depolymerizable Dynamic and recyclable thermoset materials for use in photo based am methods by changing the chemistries used in the backbone and cross-linking of the thermal set materials we can incorporate functional groups that make the material capable of having the wear and thermal resistant benefits of cross-thinkable thermal sets

    00:05:31 but also capable of being broken down depolymerized and or reprocessed after the part is no longer needed what is critical in these depolymerizable thermoset materials is control over the baked bound and we do this through stimuli such as heat light chemical sensing and pH for example the parts in these vials are cross-linked and will not melt or break down in

    00:05:53 ambient conditions but when we place them in a basic solution we can see the part disappear over time in the future someone could recapture the monomer of the material and reuse it for future science as we continue to develop Dynamic and reprocessable thermoset materials the more sustainable 3D printing can be as a field here at

    00:06:14 llnl this is just one example of how we work towards solving societal scientific challenges and make the next generation of 3D printing polymers