Carbon materials can exhibit outstanding thermal and electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, and chemical inertness, making them very attractive and widely employed in aerospace composites, energy storage, water purification, and tissue engineering. As suchLooking forward there is a strong need to produce lightweight carbons with easy-to-tailor macroscopic carbon structures on-demand, including their shape and, size size, and density to address different material/product requirements. While previous research efforts have demonstrated the use of additive manufacturing-based methods (i.e. 3D printing) to fabricate carbons from polymer precursors, most require special materials systemsto print and carefully optimized printinprocessing conditions. As a result, industrially viable methods for scalable production of structured carbons usinAdditionally, the demonstration of density control over final carbon products is still lackingg 3D printing are still lacking. This talk will discuss our recent progress on the controlling the density offabrication of carbon materials through the combined use of fused deposition modeling (FDM) and conventional polymer precursors. Particularly, a rational material and process design concept will be elucidated to enable lightweight carbon matrix composite manufacturing.  We will also discuss how the density of carbon materials will affect their final mechanical properties. Overall, our technique represents a new method to produce lightweight, macroscopically structured carbon materials using FDM.

Fabrication of lightweight, polymer-derived carbons using additive manufacturing density control in structured carbon

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.