High Performance & Smart Manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing can be considered as one of the key factors for sustainable economic growth, increasing competitiveness and innovative technology with the potential to transform global manufacturing industry, to influence the environmental impact and to change the European economies. In recent years, 3D printing has grown rapidly and has shown great potential in various application fields: from bioengineering, to microfluidics and electronics. There is a growing interest for 3D printing focused on the production of functional structures. The possibility to obtain functional elements by 3D printing, such as batteries, antennas, membranes, sensors etc. is one of the key points of the evolution of this technology. Research on new kinds of printable materials and the ability to control and predict their performance are essential to achieve broader use of 3-D printing. Engineered materials, specifically studied for being 3D printable and exhibiting optimized properties and multifunctionality, will provide intense potential and opportunities in a myriad of applications, resulting in better functionality of the manufactured device (e.g, biocompatibility, electrical conductivity, optical response, chemical sensitivity, mechanical behaviour...) coupled with improved printability. The main approaches in the evolution of 3D printable materials consist in working with multiple materials or nanocomposites to create new combinations that have unique properties expanding the range of 3D printable objects. This Ph.D research activity on High Performance & Smart Manufacturing has been held in Materials and Micro Systems Laboratory of Politecnico di Torino (ChiLab) and in collaboration with Microla Optoelectronics S.r.l. First, a study of Additive Manufacturing techniques, already on the market, was performed. Then the optimization of a stereolithographic printing machine was carried out. One part of the PhD research was based on the study of new smart materials, with intrinsic features that can give to the printed objects a concrete function. For this purpose, functionalized photosensitive polymers, realized by Politecnico di Torino, were used to build 3D structures. Also aromatic polymers were laser processed with the aim to make them conductive and, in the future, reliable for additive manufacturing processes. A further and important task during the PhD activity was the integration of stereolithographic processes both at micro and nanoscale. This important task was possible thanks to the fruitful collaboration with the Laser Zentrum of Hannover (LZH - Germany). At LZH laboratories, a two-photon polymerization (2PP) set-up allowed the fabrication of different nano-structures for microfluidic application. The first attempt was the fabrication of a nano-filter printed directly inside a micro-channel outlet as published in “3D printed suspended micro-filter integrated in a printed microfluidic channel”. This work, once established the process feasibility, may lead to an interesting application in Bioanalytics for the sieving of extracellular vesicles of endocytic origin.