The innovation engine for new materials

Roberto Chavez

Roberto Chavez

Major: 

Chemistry

University: 

University of California, Santa Barbara

Mentor(s): 

Neil Dolinski

Faculty Sponsor(s): 

Craig Hawker

Faculty Sponsor's Department(s): 

Materials

Project Title: 

Exploring Interfaces of Wavelength Selective Resins for 3D Printing

Project Description: 

3D printing is an exciting technology that allows users to produce highly complex and specific custom parts with ease. While this technique is promising, it has major issues that keep it from being a standard tool for product manufacturing. The first issue resides in the layer-by-layer nature of traditional 3D printing. The process is time consuming and the resulting materials lack strength due to the layer defects throughout the final part. Secondly, users are limited to only one type of material at a time unless the ink is changed in the middle of the printing process or through the use of a highly expensive printer. To alleviate these issues, we have developed a dual radical/cationic one-pot printing resin with wavelength selective activation of chemistries. By design, our resins incorporate multimaterial printing capabilities, opening the avenue for the production of parts with multiple physical properties in a single step. To demonstrate the strength of our materials, a new set of resins that incorporates chemically distinct monomers has been developed to study the interface both via compositional and mechanical methods. The preliminary analysis of the nanoindentation data showed excellent bonding between the two materials with tight interfaces of approximately 50 microns.