In recent years, additive manufacturing (AM) of metal components has emerged as a uniquely powerful tool for rapid prototyping, as well as for creating complex parts without the need for fasteners or welding. We are motivated to explore vat polymerization for the fabrication of metals because this class of techniques is capable of achieving both high resolution and high throughput, making it a good candidate for practical industrial use. While vat polymerization has been widely utilized to fabricate a wide variety of polymeric materials and some ceramics, fabricating metals is an outstanding challenge in the field. In addition, creating functional materials with vat polymerization typically relies on the use of resins containing metal precursors either suspended, dissolved, or chemically integrated into oligomers, which leads to challenges with resin stability, processability, and/or difficult syntheses.
In this presentation, we report a novel and facile method for the fabrication of a wide variety of metals and alloys via vat polymerization AM and subsequent post-processing and thermal treatment. We streamline the AM process by enabling the fabrication of many materials starting with a single resin composition and a single set of processing conditions during the vat polymerization process, followed by infiltration of appropriate metal precursors and post-processing heat treatment to convert the polymer/precursor matrix to the target metal. We demonstrate the fabrication and characterization of copper, nickel, silver, cobalt, cupronickel alloys, tungsten, and others. We characterize these structures using X-ray diffraction, focused ion beam milling combined with scanning electron microscopy, and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, investigating the relationship between processing and microstructure of these additively manufactured metals, and highlighting the wide-ranging versatility of this technique.

Enabling versatility in vat polymerization additive manufacturing of metals and alloys

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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