3D Printing of Smart Materials

Abstract

“Additive manufacturing (AM)” or “rapid prototyping” or often alias as “3D printing (3DP)” is a flourishing technology that has created a vast space in manufacturing industries. Its application zones cover several areas, including the biomedical, aerospace, military, and automotive industries. It can effortlessly produce a complex structure, which is a challenge to the traditional manufacturing systems, and recent progress regarding the 3D printing of smart material is like icing on the cake. Usually, smart materials behave perceptively with external stimuli like heat, pressure, moisture, pH, light, chemicals, magnetic, and electric fields. Considering this prospect, the 3D-printed smart materials transfigure their structures over time where “time” is well thought as the 4th dimension in 3D coordinates. This behavior culminates into a new technology, i.e., 4D printing (4DP). 3D printing of smart materials, like shape memory alloys (SMAs), shape memory polymers (SMPs), shape memory ceramics, shape memory gel (SMG), shape memory hybrids (SMHs), and shape memory composites (SMCs), is a pathway toward the evolution of 4DP. The use of nanotechnology in the 3D-printed smart material composite is an added advantage to 4DP. In a nutshell, this chapter elucidates the 3D printing of smart materials and printing methods.