Issue 6, 2019

3D printing with 2D colloids: designing rheology protocols to predict ‘printability’ of soft-materials

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) techniques and so-called 2D materials have undergone an explosive growth in the past decade. The former opens multiple possibilities in the manufacturing of multifunctional complex structures, and the latter on a wide range of applications from energy to water purification. Extrusion-based 3D printing, also known as Direct Ink Writing (DIW), robocasting, and often simply 3D printing, provides a unique approach to introduce advanced and high-added-value materials with limited availability into lab-scale manufacturing. On the other hand, 2D colloids of graphene oxide (GO) exhibit a fascinating rheology and can aid the processing of different materials to develop ‘printable’ formulations. This work provides an in-depth rheological study of GO suspensions with a wide range of behaviours from Newtonian-like to viscoelastic ‘printable’ soft solids. The combination of extensional and shear rheology reveals the network formation process as GO concentration increases from <0.1 vol% to 3 vol%. Our results also demonstrate that the quantification of ‘printability’ can be based on three rheology parameters: the stiffness of the network via the storage modulus (G′), the solid-to-liquid transition or flow stress (σf), and the flow transition index, which relates the flow and yield stresses (FTI = σf/σy).

Graphical abstract: 3D printing with 2D colloids: designing rheology protocols to predict ‘printability’ of soft-materials

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
21 Sep 2018
Accepted
12 Dec 2018
First published
22 Jan 2019
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Soft Matter, 2019,15, 1444-1456

3D printing with 2D colloids: designing rheology protocols to predict ‘printability’ of soft-materials

A. Corker, H. C.-H. Ng, R. J. Poole and E. García-Tuñón, Soft Matter, 2019, 15, 1444 DOI: 10.1039/C8SM01936C

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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