Ethyl cellulose-based thermoreversible organogel photoresist for sedimentation-free volumetric additive manufacturing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a thermoreversible ethyl cellulose-based gel photoresist that enables sedimentation-free volumetric additive manufacturing and supports multimaterial printing without hardware modifications.

Contribution

The study develops a simple, transparent, thermoreversible gel photoresist with non-zero yield stress, allowing sedimentation-free volumetric printing and multimaterial object suspension.

Findings

Enables sedimentation-free volumetric printing of low-viscosity monomers.

Supports suspension of objects for multimaterial printing.

Doubles flexural strength compared to neat monomer.

Abstract

Liquid photoresists are abundant in the field of light-based additive manufacturing (AM). However, printing unsupported directly into a vat of material in emerging volumetric AM technologies$-$typically a benefit due to fewer geometric constraints and less material waste$-$can be a limitation when printing low-viscosity liquid monomers and multimaterial constructs due to part drift or sedimentation. With ethyl cellulose (EC), a thermoplastic soluble in organic liquids, we formulate a simple three-component transparent thermoreversible gel photoresist with melting temperature of ~64 $\deg$C. The physically crosslinked network of the gel leads to storage moduli in the range of 0.1$-$10 kPa and maximum yield stress of 2.7 kPa for a 10 wt$\%$ EC gel photoresist. Non-zero yield stress enables sedimentation-free tomographic volumetric patterning in low-viscosity monomer without additional hardware or modification of apparatus. Additionally, objects inserted into the print container can be suspended in the gel material which enables overprinting of multimaterial devices without anchors connecting the object to the printing container. Flexural strength is also improved by 100% compared to the neat monomer for a formulation with 7 wt$\%$ EC.