Electric-field-driven jet deposition 3D printing

Multi-scale and multi-material 3D printing technique has been considered as a revolutionary technology and next-generation manufacturing tool which can really fulfill the “creating material” and “creating life”, especially subvert traditional product design and manufacturing scheme. However, very few of the established additive manufacturing processes have now the capability to fully implement the multi-scale and multi-material fabrication. It is still a significant challenging issue for existing additive manufacturing technologies to implement the multi-material and multi-scale 3D printing for fabricating heterogeneous and hierarchical structured object at full scale ranging from nano to macro-scale. This paper presents a novel 3D printing technique, electric-field-driven jet deposition 3D printing, which offers a promsing and feasible approach to really fulfill multi-scale and multi-material additive manufacturing at low cost. Two new printing schemes, which include pulsed cone-jet mode and continuous cone-jet mode, are proposed herein considering both accuracy and efficiency for multi-scale manufacturing. The experimental results have demonstrated and verified the unique and outstanding advantages of the proposed 3D printing process which involve good universality, and are almost unrestricted in terms of arbitrary substrates (conductive, nonconductive, non-planar, curve, etc.), various solutions and melted materials printed, conductive and non-conductive nozzles, stand-off distance between the nozzle and substrate, and the flexibility to macro/micro fabrication. These four typical cases have shown that the electric-field-driven jet deposition 3D printing provides a promising and effective method to implement the multi-material and multi-scale 3D printing at low cost for fabricating heterogeneous and hierarchical structured object at full scale ranging from micro to macro-scale. As a result, this study offers a novel solution for fulfilling multi-scale and multi-material 3D printing at low cost and good universality as well as high resolution. © 2018, Science Press. All right reserved.