Design and Synthesis of Polymeric Materials for Additive Manufacturing of Glass and Reversible Thermoset

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) keeps attracting attention in both academics and industries. To meet the requirements for more applications, it is always desirable to develop new materials or optimize existing materials for different AM technologies.This dissertation mainly focuses on how organic synthesis is utilized as a powerful tool to develop novel materials for different AM techniques. Photo-based printing of inorganic glass and fused filament fabrication (FFF) of thermoreversible thermosets are the subjects of this work. In the first part of chapter 1, the background of AM of glass is introduced, including different types of manufacturing methods and the different types of materials paired with each manufacturing technique. The second part of chapter 1 briefly introduces the Diels-Alder (DA)-based materials and how the DA-based systems were used for AM. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on describing how to fabricate inorganic silica glass micro-optics with liquid silica resin (LSR) and the photo-based AM technique. It introduces how the LSR was synthesized using sol-gel chemistry and how it was optimized for fabricating different optical elements. The properties of LSR, including curing performance, printing behavior, optical properties before/after thermal treatment, etc. were studied. Micro-optics and optical systems were fabricated and their performance was evaluated. Chapter 4 shows how a Diels-Alder reversible thermoset nanocomposite (DARTN) was prepared based on a furan-maleimide system, and how to use a commercial fused filament fabrication (FFF) printer to 3D print this DARTN. In this chapter, we demonstrated that the isotropic mechanical properties after printing can be achieved and the high loading of fillers can be mixed into this material without additional solvent. It also discussed how the mechanical properties of this material can be tuned by either adjusting the molecular weight of building blocks used in the material or by changing the filler loading. Furthermore, we also observed a post-curing behavior of DARTN and proposed the possible mechanism of the post-curing behavior. Lastly, chapter 5 discussed some work that can be done in the future. It includes both the perspective of the glass printing and the perspective of DA-based reversible thermoset for FFF.