Seminar on Simple Chemistries for Printing Advanced Materials

EPFL, Switzerland

This seminar will be chaired by Asst Prof Liang Xuan.

Vat photopolymerization (VP) is one of the most versatile additive manufacturing processes today, capable of high throughputs and small feature sizes. However, a key limitation with VP is that there is a limited library of materials compatible with it; VP is most compatible with polymers, making the printing of ceramics and metals challenging. Even on the polymers front, while we can print polymers of a wide variety of compositions, it is still difficult to control the (micro)structure of the printed polymer. Given these ongoing material challenges, there is incredible opportunity to think about how we can leverage chemistry and materials science to tackle these limitations. Importantly, given the broad accessibility to VP, it is important that we design solutions that are equally accessible so that we can empower both the public and the larger scientific community with the advanced materials and devices needed to solve their own challenges.

In this talk, I will discuss our approaches to material design for VP and highlight how simple chemistries can address some long-standing challenges in VP. In particular, I will show our recent advances in the field of polymer-derived materials, and some of our nascent work on architecture-switching structures. Together, these demonstrations underscore how the combination of chemistry, materials science, and advanced manufacturing can enable substantial innovations in materials design, fabrication, and application.