Sustainability of 3D printing can be reflected in three main aspects: deployment of renewable inks, recycling of printed products, and applications for time-, materials-savings, and efficiency-improving. In this work, we demonstrated sustainable vat-photopolymerization (VPP) based 3D printing in a whole life-cycle process by developing a renewable ink made of soybean oil and natural polyphenols, and recycling the ink for reprinting or converting printed biocomposite to flash graphene (FG) as reinforcement nanofillers in the biocomposite. We also realized its applications in fabricating lightweight, materials-saving 3D structures, acoustic metamaterials, and disposable microreactors for time-saving and efficiency-improving synthesis of metal-organic framework nanostructures. In addition to enhancing the tensile strength and Young’s modulus of the biopolymers by 42% and 232% with only 0.6 wt% FG nanofillers, respectively, FG improved the printability of the ink in forming 3D tubular structures, which are usually very hard to be achieved in transparent resin. Success of this work will inspire further development for sustainability in 3D printing.

Sustainable 3D printing of recyclable biocomposite empowered by flash graphene

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