Directed Assembly of Mesoscale Architectures in Additive Manufacturing

The project is in collaboration with professors A.J. Boydston of the University of Wisconsin; Randall Erb and Safa Jamali of Northeastern University; and Arthi Jayaraman of the University of Delaware. The team’s expertise spans chemistry, materials science, simulation, machine learning, machine design, and characterization.

While additive manufacturing can create complex geometries from a wide variety of materials, it is typically not possible to control the architecture of the material at a length scale smaller than the resolution of the additive process. The MURI team will combine additive manufacturing with “bottom-up” directed assembly, using tailored nanoparticle building blocks and polymers, and by building new instruments to study the process and validate computational predictions. The end goal of the project is to realize materials and structures with emergent thermal electromagnetic, and optical properties that could be used in, for instance, cooling of high-power electronics, next-generation communication systems, and high-performance cameras.