3D printing of polymers is slowly becoming ubiquitous in the manufacturing of functional parts that can meet demanding mechanical property requirements. This has been mainly driven by the development of newer materials that can achieve the desired properties. Issues such as polymerization shrinkage and the associated shrinkage stress that lead to problems in traditional polymer applications also affect 3D printing. Layer-by-layer printing employed in SLA and DLP-based 3D printing leads to anisotropy in the material properties. It has been reported that the modulus of the materials in the direction of printing is higher than that in the perpendicular direction which is parallel to the layers being printed. Depth of cure is an important parameter to control for the resolution of the layer thickness and this is significantly affected by the monomer diffusion that occurs during cure between. Polymeric nanoparticles or nanogels have been shown to have beneficial effects for reducing shrinkage and shrinkage stress and monomer diffusion, partly due to their highly internally crosslinked structure. We report the use these nanogels as materials for replacing monomers for solving the issues related to 3D printing. Low viscosity nanogels (&lt; 10 nm diameter) were made and formulated with triethylene glycol dimethacrylate as monomer at 0 wt%, 25 wt% and 50 wt% using Diphenyl(2,4,6-trimethylbenzoyl)phosphine oxide as photoinitiator. A 3D structure printed with the control monomer showed a low resolution in the print direction due to the layer by layer printing whereas the nanogel-based materials showed much higher resolution with an almost smooth surface. This shows that nanogels can be used as additives or can completely replace monomers for 3D printing applications while solving some of the issues hampering the current set of materials.

3D printing with polymeric nanogel particles

255th National Meeting (2018)

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