Emerging Technological Applications of Additive Manufacturing

Once considered to be a field specific to mechanical sciences, additive manufacturing has now proliferated into all streams of science and swiftly becoming a true global phenomenon. Moving well beyond printing of customized prototypes and trinkets, many enterprises now manufacture using 3D printing at moderate to large scale. Massive improvements in precision, quality and reliability of additive manufacturing have triggered rapid uptake of this technology in the research and development sector especially in fields such as chemical engineering, electronic engineering, materials engineering, biochemistry, optics, analytical sciences, industrial chemistry, and environmental sciences. This chapter highlights some interesting applications of additive manufacturing in chemical processes such as catalysis, separation, and high throughout experimentation, sensing devices such as microfluidics, electrochemical, optical, optoelectronic, and electrical sensors, and energy systems such as batteries and capacitors. The advantages of AM porous catalysts and adsorbents materialize from their high catalytic and separation efficiencies, hierarchical porosity, suitable flow properties, superior mass and energy transfer, novel composite formulations, enhanced product selectivity and high throughput processing of reactants. On the other hand, additively manufactured sensor and energy systems gain the benefits of high performance, better cycling performance (charging/discharging), multifunctionality, geometric shape complexity, customized design, shaping of amorphous materials, better integration of device components and in three dimensions, portability, device flexibility, self-powering capability, and automatic operation. In all such applications the chemical reactivity of the 3D printed construct governs its primary functionality in addition to the shape derived basic function. Clearly this is an ascension from the simple use of printed constructs as 3D objects of complex shapes and geometry. Starting with a brief discussion on the rise of additive manufacturing in chemical sciences, this chapter mainly focusses on the applications of additive manufacturing while building on the knowledge gained in the previous chapters. The applications have been classified as surface sensitive chemical processes which are confined to the first few hundred microns of the surface of a 3D printed construct, bulk sensitive chemical processes which depend on the bulk properties of 3D constructs and high throughput experimentation applications. A summary and outlook section conclude the chapter with a perspective and viewpoint on the future frontiers for additive manufacturing in chemical processes and a knowledge test has been provided for the young learners in the last section.