Single-Step Fabrication and Programming of Shape-Memory Polymers

Manufacturing technologies that employ smart materials have the potential to revitalize American manufacturing in diverse areas, such as aerospace, biomedicine, energy, and healthcare, through creation of devices that can perform dynamic functions that cannot be achieved by any current approach. Gaps in understanding of the design and preparation of smart materials and the effects of materials processing on their properties and functionality has led to limited fabrication paradigms.

This work investigates the fundamental science underlying the interaction of programmed temperature-induced strains and the changes in shape upon heating of shape memory polymers. A process termed Programming-via-Printing will enable single-step fabrication of fully 3D, solid or porous devices with uniform or spatially varying functionality from individual, rather than composite, smart materials using 3D printers.

This research has the potential not only to promote the progress of science through improved fundamental understanding of manufacturing of smart materials but will advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare by broadly impacting the many fields using smart materials. Improved understanding will bring the manufacturing of complex smart material devices to new application areas.

The multi-disciplinary approach and integrated science and engineering education activities will help broaden participation of underrepresented groups in research and democratize and facilitate spread of the technology developed.

The research will use integrated, interdisciplinary experimentation and simulation to contribute in-depth understanding of advanced manufacturing principles for application of shape-memory polymers in 3D printing. Strains programmed in 3D shape-memory polymers during printing can be quantitatively understood, predicted, and controlled to create complex shapes and functions not currently achieved.

The research will: study and tune programming of shape-memory during printing; model determinants of shape-memory from synthesis through printing to understand, predict, and control function; and design, characterize, and study in proof-of-concept shape-memory polymer devices that can only be prepared when programmed via printing. These contributions are significant, because they are expected to provide new fundamental manufacturing understanding of the design, development, and modification of shape-memory polymers for 3D printing while also broadly enabling future applications of shape-memory polymers in 3D printing through study of the Programming-via-Printing approach and discovery of new manufacturing phenomena that can only be studied or applied when shape-memory is programmed via printing.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.