CBE & MSE Seminar: Additive Manufacturing and Architected Materials

Abstract: Material properties are governed by the chemical composition and spatial arrangement of constituent elements. Over the past decade, the field of architected materials has sought to design, fabricate and demonstrate materials with performance that is fundamentally controlled by geometry at multiple length-scales rather than chemical composition alone. There have been many advancements, ranging from the maturation of additive manufacturing technologies that can be used to realize these materials, to inverse design methods such as topology optimization and even unique new material feedstocks which make up the structures. This presentation will touch on all aspects of the architected materials realization process as well as evaluate performance of some of those materials. Specifically, we have demonstrated designer properties of these architected materials in polymers, metals, ceramics and combinations thereof. In addition to novel properties such as ultra-stiff lightweight materials, negative stiffness and negative thermal expansion, I will present multifunctional architected materials with energy storage capability and architectures that respond to external fields. Many of these architected materials derived from advanced design and optimization methods we have been developing and were fabricated with custom additive-manufacturing techniques. These include projection microstereolithography (PmSL), direct ink writing (DIW), electrophoretic deposition (EPD), volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM), computed axial lithography (CAL) and diode-based additive manufacturing (DiAM), to name a few. New materials, including graphene aerogel, carbon fiber composites and printed glass, will also be touched upon.

Bio: Christopher M. Spadaccini, Ph.D., is currently the director of the Additive Manufacturing Initiative at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as well as the leader of the Center for Engineered Materials and Manufacturing. He has been working in advanced additive manufacturing process development and architected materials for the last decade and has over 50 journal publications, three book chapters and 25 patents awarded, with 18 pending. He founded several new fabrication laboratories at LLNL for process development focused on micro- and nanoscale features and mixed material printing. Spadaccini received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1997, 1999 and 2004 respectively, and has been a member of the LLNL technical staff for over 14 years. He has also been a lecturer in the Chemical, Materials, and Biomedical Engineering Department at San Jose State University, where he taught graduate courses in heat, mass and momentum transfer.

Host: Lorenzo Valdevit