3D Printing High-Performance Nanocellulose and Chitosan Composites—The Importance of Nanostructuring and Complexation

Nanostructuring of polymeric nanocomposite materials is important for wide use and rapid scale development towards high-performance materials. Nanomaterials together with sustainable biobased polymers can be used to enhance performance in thermoplastics, thermosets, and elastomers and their thermo-mechanical properties. In this talk, we focus on the use of cellulosic and non-cellulosic additives to improve the performance of composite polymer materials. Nanostructuring is based on improving the dispersion using complexation methods and with the synergistic blending of other nanomaterials such as silica. This has been demonstrated in SLA/DLP 3D printing methodologies which can make use of blended or formulated photopolymerizable compositions of these nanomaterials. Increased toughness and fracture energy can be achieved with a minimum percolation threshold of as little as 0.3%. By incorporating nanomaterials such as nanocellulose,nanosilica, nanoclays with 3D printing new designs of toughened materials can compete with other high-performance polymers with CAD design-based manufacturing. 4D Printing will be demonstrated based on stimuli-responsive properties.