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GLASSES

Divide and print

Nature Materials volume 19, pages 131–133 (2020)Cite this article

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A three-dimensional printing approach based on the photopolymerization-induced phase separation of resins is used to fabricate complex glass structures with distinct chemical composition and porosity.

Glasses range among the most important high-performance materials of the twenty-first century — they surround us in everyday life. From architecture to household glassware, from the lenses in our smartphones to the fibre optical components that provide fast internet access to billions of users — modern life is unthinkable without glass. Even though humankind has used glasses for more than five millennia, the modern manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing have only recently opened up for glasses1,2. Now, writing in Nature Materials, Kunal Masania and colleagues describe a versatile 3D printing technique for the generation of multicomponent glass monoliths with tunable porosity3. The approach is based on the controlled phase separation of photopolymerizable liquid resins using a digital light-processing printer to achieve a fine morphological tuning of the polymerized structures at the voxel scale.

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Fig. 1: Printing nanoporous 3D glasses via stereolithography.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Process Technology, NeptunLab, Department of Microsystems Engineering (IMTEK), Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Dorothea Helmer & Bastian E. Rapp

  2. FIT Freiburg Centre for Interactive Materials and Bioinspired Technologies, Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Dorothea Helmer & Bastian E. Rapp

  3. Freiburg Materials Research Center (FMF), Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Bastian E. Rapp

Authors
  1. Dorothea Helmer
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  2. Bastian E. Rapp
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Correspondence to Bastian E. Rapp.

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Helmer, D., Rapp, B.E. Divide and print. Nat. Mater. 19, 131–133 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0594-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0594-y

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