Additive manufacturing of micro-architected metals via hydrogel infusion

Abstract

Metal additive manufacturing (AM) enables the production of high value and high performance components with applications from the aerospace to biomedical fields. Layer-by-layer fabrication circumvents the geometric limitations of traditional metalworking techniques, allowing topologically optimized parts to be made rapidly and efficiently. Existing AM techniques rely on thermally initiated melting or sintering for part shaping, a costly and material-limited process. We report an AM technique that produces metals and alloys with microscale resolution via vat photopolymerization (VP). 3D-architected hydrogels are infused with metal precursors, then calcined and reduced to convert the hydrogel scaffolds into miniaturized metal replicas. This approach represents a paradigm shift in VP; the material is selected only after the structure is fabricated. Unlike existing VP strategies, which incorporate target materials or precursors into the photoresin during printing, our method does not require re-optimization of resins and curing parameters for different materials, enabling quick iteration, compositional tuning, and the ability to fabricate multimaterials. We demonstrate AM of metals with critical dimensions of ~40 µm that are challenging to fabricate using conventional processes. Such hydrogel-derived metals have highly twinned microstructures and unusually high hardness, providing a pathway to create advanced metallic micromaterials.

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