Grant: Discovery Launch Supplement

Additive manufacturing techniques are transforming our modern fabrication ecosystem. For industries that require high-value component fabrication like robotics, autonomous vehicles, and medical devices, additive manufacturing provides unmatched design freedom to enable complex part geometries at lower costs compared to mass fabrication techniques such as injection molding or die casting. Despite these advantages, standard and additive manufacturing fall short in terms of material integration. While nearly all devices require a combination of dissimilar materials (e.g. polymer, metal, glass), fabrication is done for each material in isolation, with a final assembly step done by hand or robot. In this program, we propose to upend this siloed approach by capitalizing on newly developed volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) techniques to fabricate specialty optics that require the integration of two disparate materials with complexity in the 3D structures. VAM is a new light-based 3D printing approach that uses tomographic processes to generate objects with complex geometries in a volume of photoresins. Unlike current 3D printing methods that build up objects one layer at a time, VAM prints all-at-once or volumetrically. Though still a nascent technology, VAM affords many advantages; VAM is ~10-100x faster than comparable 3D printing methods (prints in seconds vs. minutes or hours) and requires no support structures, enabling far more complex geometries. Most compelling, however, is that VAM has a unique ability to print a 3D object of one material over an existing 3D object of a different material, a process called overprinting. Thus, this program will focus on developing the materials and processes required for VAM printing and will demonstrate the strength of overprinting with disparate materials, affording achromatic and electro-tunable optical lenses. To achieve this goal, the program includes 1) developing VAM-specific resins required to fabricate high quality lenses; 2) developing the chemistries that allow overprinting of materials that can be metallized into conductive features; 3) developing the overprinting methodologies using the resins developed in (1) and (2); and 4) fabricating and evaluating multi-material lenses. The outcome of this program will support the shift from the time consuming, labor intensive and costly methods currently used to manufacture specialty optics (e.g. micro-machining, injection molding, die casting) to one that affords high dimensional accuracy, structural complexity, cost efficiency and importantly with multi-material capabilities. This work will help maintain Canada at the forefront of VAM research. Furthermore, through training of graduate students this program will produce highly qualified personnel in an area important to the Canadian and global economy.