2024 AIChE Annual Meeting
(272d) Transformation of Additively Manufactured Commodity Plastic Filaments to Carbon/Metal Oxide Composites to Enable a Sustainable Future
Authors
Smith, P. - Presenter, University of Southern Mississippi
Griffin, A., University of Southern Mississippi
Aguinaga, J., The University of Southern Mississippi
Jones, K., The University of Southern Mississippi
Jones, K., The University of Southern Mississippi
Bounds, E., The University of Southern Mississippi
Xiang, Y., Mississippi State University
Patton, D., The University of Southern Mississippi
Qiang, Z., University of Southern Mississippi
Recently, additive manufacturing (AM) has emerged as one of the most important growth areas for manufacturing technology. Looking forward, low-cost, integrated AM technology will be a core component of realizing Industry 4.0, while meeting the diverse application demands requires that AM have access to a broad material design space. While polymers, metals, and ceramic materials for AM have been well established, the AM of carbon materials remains underexplored. Recent research efforts have established a simple and scalable approach to fabricate structurally complex carbon matrices with high dimensional accuracy on demand through fused filament fabrication (FFF) 3D printing of polyolefins. This work leverages the FFF of polyolefins to enable the generation of well defined, large scale, carbon/transition metal oxide (TMO) composite materials. This is achieved by introducing a treatment procedure prior to pyrolysis, leading to the in-situ formation of nanoparticles within the carbon structure upon pyrolysis. 3D printed carbon/TMO composites can be obtained with excellent dimensional accuracy, while the nanoparticle loading content can be simply tuned through varying the concentration of the treatment solution. The morphology of these materials reveals well dispersed metal nanoparticles within continuous microporous carbon matrices, which exhibit relatively high surface areas. This method enables facile control over nanoparticle identity and direct access to multi-metal carbon/TMO composites while providing an opportunity to create 3D printed carbon composites with spatially controlled properties. We will also demonstrate the use of these materials for industrial decarbonization, such as through efficient electrification of heating process for hydrogen production.