3D Printing Bioinspired Ceramic Composites.

Natural structural materials like bone and shell have complex, hierarchical architectures designed to control crack propagation and fracture. In modern composites there is a critical trade-off between strength and toughness. Natural structures provide blueprints to overcome this, however this approach introduces another trade-off between fine structural manipulation and manufacturing complex shapes in practical sizes and times.

Graphene Oxide: An All-in-One Processing Additive for 3D Printing.

Many 3D printing technologies are based on the development of inks and pastes to build objects through droplet or filament deposition (the latter also known as continuous extrusion, robocasting, or direct ink writing). Controlling and tuning rheological behavior is key for successful manufacturing using these techniques. Different formulations have been proposed, but the search continues for approaches that are clean, flexible, robust and that can be adapted to a wide range of materials.

Using graphene networks to build bioinspired self-monitoring ceramics.

The properties of graphene open new opportunities for the fabrication of composites exhibiting unique structural and functional capabilities. However, to achieve this goal we should build materials with carefully designed architectures. Here, we describe the fabrication of ceramic-graphene composites by combining graphene foams with pre-ceramic polymers and spark plasma sintering.

Autonomous self-healing structural composites with bio-inspired design.

Strong and tough natural composites such as bone, silk or nacre are often built from stiff blocks bound together using thin interfacial soft layers that can also provide sacrificial bonds for self-repair. Here we show that it is possible exploit this design in order to create self-healing structural composites by using thin supramolecular polymer interfaces between ceramic blocks. We have built model brick-and-mortar structures with ceramic contents above 95 vol% that exhibit strengths of the order of MPa (three orders of magnitude higher than the interfacial polymer) and fracture energies that are two orders of magnitude higher than those of the glass bricks.

Printing in three dimensions with graphene.

Responsive graphene oxide sheets form non-covalent networks with optimum rheological properties for 3D printing. These networks have shear thinning behavior and sufficiently high elastic shear modulus (G') to build self-supporting 3D structures by direct write assembly. Drying and thermal reduction leads to ultra-light graphene-only structures with restored conductivity and elastomeric behavior.