2024 AIChE Annual Meeting
Additive Manufacturing (DIW) of Energetic Inks
Additive manufacturing (AM), known as 3D printing, is widely used today to produce complex geometries quickly and cheaply. The ability to produce exact, repeatable, designs has intrigued the energetics community who would like the ability to rapidly produce explosive designs for wave shaping. Two main problems that occur when AM energetics, heat and density. Energetic performance is exponentially related to the density of material; discovering an AM technique that maintains high solids loading and density is required to be useful for military applications. Based on Pluronic F-127, we developed a stackable, high solids loading, high-density direct ink writing (DIW) ink that can be printed without heat or UV-curing. Additionally, the DIW ink developed utilizes a water-based solvent which greatly increases safety during the processing and printing of energetic materials. Currently, microgram and nanogram copper particles have been developed into printable inks which will be used to form the shape charge portion of our 3D model. Initial work incorporating explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) into the DIW ink has been successful with the ink printed into basic geometric shapes. Future work will be conducted to optimize the print settings for the PETN DIW ink.