Abstract
Polymer nanocomposites have always attracted the interest of researchers and industry because of their potential combination of properties from both the nanofillers and the hosting matrix. Gathering nanomaterials and 3D printing could offer clear advantages and numerous new opportunities in several application fields. Embedding nanofillers in a polymeric matrix could improve the final material properties but usually the printing process gets more difficult. Considering this drawback, in this paper we propose a method to obtain polymer nanocomposites by in situ generation of nanoparticles after the printing process. 3D structures were fabricated through a Digital Light Processing (DLP) system by disolving metal salts in the starting liquid formulation. The 3D fabrication is followed by a thermal treatment in order to induce in situ generation of metal nanoparticles (NPs) in the polymer matrix. Comprehensive studies were systematically performed on the thermo-mechanical characteristics, morphology and electrical properties of the 3D printed nanocomposites.
Highlights
Great efforts are being produced in the attempt to develop new nanocomposite processing techniques that may allow the production of highly reliable and precise 3D microstructures: A very promising and potentially cost-effective approach to manufacture such nanocomposite microdevices is represented by 3D printing [14,15,16,17]
A new method to obtain 3D polymer-based NCs was proposed [44]: The results established a novel approach for the preparation of 3D nanocomposites by coupling the photoreduction of metal precursors with the Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology, allowing the fabrication of conductive 3D hybrid structures consisting of metal nanoparticles and organic polymers shaped in complex multilayered architectures
Into photocurable polymer formulations based on polyethylene glycol diacrylate (PEGDA) and exposing them to DLP system
Summary
Polymer-based nanocomposites (NCs) have been extensively studied in the last decades as a means to achieve improved properties via the control of the interactions between the polymeric host and the nanostructured filler [1,2]: They have become an important class of materials exploited in many different applications such as optics [3,4,5,6], microelectronics [7,8,9], bioactive materials [10,11] and others [12]. There are many nano- and micro-fabrication techniques available for the realization of such type of NCs, including electron beam lithography, photolithography, ink-jet printing, direct-write techniques, soft lithography and contact printing [13] These techniques do not offer simple approaches to fabricate three-dimensional (3D) structures. A new method to obtain 3D polymer-based NCs was proposed [44]: The results established a novel approach for the preparation of 3D nanocomposites by coupling the photoreduction of metal precursors with the DLP technology, allowing the fabrication of conductive 3D hybrid structures consisting of metal nanoparticles and organic polymers shaped in complex multilayered architectures. Based on previous studies [44], we select the best formulation and in this paper we decided to exploit a thermal reduction of the metal precursor evaluating the possibility of contemporary sintering of the generated silver nanoparticles.
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