<br/>Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, is a burgeoning technology with great potential in the areas of rapid prototyping and on-demand product customization, and this expansion has led to increased demand for improved material and microstructure design. In particular, porous parts are desirable for weight reduction, filtration and membrane technologies, and energy dissipation materials. However, porous parts have proven difficult to print by conventional additive manufacturing techniques and often require hazardous components or processes. To that end, we have developed a strategy for the 3D printing of porous thermoplastic parts by leveraging camphene as a solvent. Due to its high vapor pressure, camphene readily sublimes <i>in vacuo</i>, which can be exploited to generate plastic parts with open pore morphologies from polymer–camphene solutions (with tunable void fractions of 40–70%). Owing to the low melting point of camphene, these solutions can be processed at mildly elevated temperatures (&lt;50 °C). Many commodity polymers were found to be readily soluble in camphene, including polystyrene, polyethylene, and SEBS. Rheological measurements of a series of polymer–camphene solutions of varying composition gave insight into the viscosity requirements for successful printing. Under optimized conditions, parts with complex geometries were successfully 3D printed. The printed parts all had porous morphologies (confirmed by SEM) with average pore diameters from 5 to 20 microns. The development of this technique grants ready access to on-demand porous parts using non-hazardous chemicals, mild processing conditions, and commodity polymers.

Camphene-assisted 3D printing of porous thermoplastics

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ACS Fall 2022

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