Meetup Presentation

This online seminar brings the scientific conference gathering to the desktops or smartphones of scientists worldwide. Researchers can present their work and keep up with cutting-edge research in the field while reducing their carbon footprint, improve the work-life balance and keep the sense of community.

It will consist of two parts, in which interaction will be the main force:

  - The Oral Session will consist on a few short broadcasted talks led by Invited Speakers, followed by a time for questions from the public driven by a moderator.

  - ePoster Session, where attendees and authors can share their ideas and get feedback from their colleagues worldwide through a chatroom.

All participants can join and present here their work. Due to the short format of the meeting (with few oral contributions), we encourage senior researchers to present ePoster, and of course we expect enthusiastic participation of junior researchers.

Nanocrystals in Additive Manufacturing: New Opportunities for Nano-enabled Devices

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, is now reaching many aspects of our society and technologies, with the promise of radically changing our conception of materials design and manufacturing. From printing artificial organs to space exploration, 3D printing will be at the center of many technological transformations. Can it also be a vector of opportunities for the integration of nanomaterials in functional devices? A large panel of 3D printing techniques has been developed, offering a great choice of versatile and complementary processing options. From the formulation of nanocomposites to printing at the nano scale, in this e-symposium we will see how 3D printing can offer a platform for the deployment of nano-enabled devices.

Concurrent advances in the programmable synthesis of nanostructured materials and additive 3D manufacturing have created a rich and exciting opportunity space to fabricate novel materials and devices. In particular, creating complex hierarchical device geometries from mesoporous materials presents several scientifically interesting and technologically relevant challenges. We recently showed how digital light processing of photoresponsive building block defined by an oxozirconium methacrylate cluster with 12 methacrylic acid ligands can be used to enable the creation of complex superstructures characterized by multi-level porous networks. Inspired by similarly complex 3D hierarchical mesoporous structures ubiquitous in nature, we demonstrated the fabrication of a 3D leaf as a proof of concept. We’ve subsequently extended this fabrication process to other starting materials (i.e., inks) including colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals and silica cages. Beyond the materials chemistry aspects, we also investigated how printing at fluid interfaces enables faster print speeds compared to conventional digital light processing approaches. This work demonstrates how exciting opportunity space emerging at the intersection of inorganic building blocks, mesoporous materials and 3D digital light processing opens new pathways to create functional hierarchical superstructures and devices with complex geometries.

Nanoscale materials are attractive and promising building blocks for a broad range of emerging technologies due to their unique and superior properties compared to the bulk form. However, converting functional nanoscale materials into high-performing systems while translating their unique properties from nanoscale to macroscale remain a major challenge due to many scientific and technological obstacles.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is of significant technological and commercial interest due to the ability to expand the design space for 3D structures, thereby leading to novel functions. Two-photon lithography (TPL) is a promising AM technique that relies on nonlinear light absorption to fabricate complex 3D structures with sub-diffraction features in photopolymer materials. It is highly desirable to have a scalable TPL process that can quickly fabricate large 3D structures with nanoscale features.  However, there has traditionally been a tradeoff between speed and feature size that has limited the scalability. We have recently developed a high-throughput nanoscale AM technique based on parallelization of TPL. Our technique increases the material processing rate by three orders of magnitude while preserving the nanoscale feature sizes. The technique relies on simultaneous spatial and temporal focusing of an ultrafast laser to implement projection-based layer-by-layer printing. Our method allows access to difficult to explore regions in the design space, increasing both the potential for cost-effective high-throughput processing and the geometric complexity of the printed objects