Designing AdvancedMaterials for AdvancedManufacturing: Strivingfor Sustainability

Additive manufacturing (AM) offers the promise for addressing looming concerns formaterials sustainability with chemical processes that require less energy and result inless material consumption. However, research must impose a lens of sustainabilityearlier in the innovation process, where processes and materials are designed to adhereto the principles of green chemistry and strive for more sustainable engineering. Novelmaterials for AM continue to emerge at a feverish rate, and it is imperative that webegin to consider end-of-life (EOL) earlier in the material and process design. Thislecture will highlight our efforts to forge a more sustainable field of additivemanufacturing, a field that continues to diversify material composition due to theunique functionality that is required for successful printing. Our research has focused onlight-based AM modalities due to the unique combination of low energy consumption,exceptional resolution that enables less material consumption in latticed architectures,and the opportunity to print high molecular weight polymers with low viscosities. Animportant motivation is the opportunity to intensify chemical processes, wherein thesynthetic chemistry occurs in a printed shape that serves as the reactor that ultimatelyresults in a printed object. Future advances in additive manufacturing (AM) will requirethe rethinking and redesign of traditional macromolecular structure. Advancedmacromolecular materials for advanced manufacturing require a precisely tailoredbalance of reactivity and rheological performance that collectively ensure preciseresolution from diverse additive manufacturing modalities. Our most recent effortsinvolve the vat photopolymerization of unsaturated polyesters in the absence of solventand the opportunity for subsequent hydrolysis, and microneedles for vaccine deliveryhave served as our motivation.