|
Background
Carbon fiber prepregs are widely used in aerospace and high-performance manufacturing since they can produce lightweight, high-strength composite structures. However, prepregs have a limited storage life, and an estimated 30–50% of prepreg material used is ultimately discarded due to expiration or manufacturing scrap. A recycling solution...
|
|
Market Opportunity
As the multi-billion dollar 3D printing market grows at an alarming pace (average 28.5% compound annual growth rate over multiple sectors), there is a need for technologies that enable faster, more accurate and economical printing. Current stereolithography (SLA) processes have sped up this process by printing layers; however, the...
|
|
Market Opportunity
Since stereolithography (SL) was invented in 1980s, various research has been done to improve its fabrication performance including fabrication speed, part size, geometry resolution, and scalability, etc. However, three main tradeoffs among the fabrication performances need to be made in the SL process that limit its broader applications,...
|
|
Market Opportunity
3D printing – especially stereolithography (SL), the most popular form of 3D printing – has an innate problem where the printed material sticks to the working surface. The solution to this problem has been to print a sacrificial layer first. This solution poses two problems: the sacrificial layer adds material costs;...
|
|
Market Opportunity
Achieving high 3D shape accuracy remains a major challenge in additive manufacturing due to complex, layer-by-layer error accumulation and interlayer interactions. Existing physics-based simulations are computationally intensive and difficult to integrate with data-driven learning, while most machine-learning approaches have focused...
|
|
Market Opportunity
Additive manufacturing of self-healing elastomers addresses a major unmet need in soft materials by enabling complex 3D architectures that can recover from damage rather than fail permanently. This capability opens significant opportunities in soft robotics, flexible electronics, structural composites, and biomedical devices, where...
|
|
Market Opportunity
Additive manufacturing continues to find applications in rapid prototyping and manufacturing. One popular technique, stereolithography, uses light energy to trigger a polymerization reaction that solidifies select portions of a photo-curable resin. Advances have been made in speed, resolution, and size. To fabricate large parts,...
|
|
Market Opportunity
Lightweight lattice materials can provide great benefits in many applications such as airplanes, drones, and automobiles where a lighter structure can result in greater mechanical efficiency. The applications of 3D lattice structures have been significantly limited due to their inability in self-repairing of damages. Creating materials...
|
|
Market Opportunity
Vat photopolymerization offers benefits over soft lithography for microfluidic device production, but the technique struggles with controlled micrometer- sized channels due to transparent resin's deep light penetration. This results in over-curing and channel blockages. There is a potential market opportunity for the development...
|
|
Market Opportunity
Porous polymer membranes are widely used in purification, filtration and various biomedical applications. Currently these porous polymer membranes are produced by solution phase processing. This process, however, is inherently disadvantaged by the solubility requirements of its precursors, restricting the combinations of different...
|