SUMMARY

Driven by the growing demand of applications in robotics, electronics, biomedical devices and wearable devices, multi-material 3D printing has now become a trend to offer solutions with a wide choice of materials with various mechanical, chemical, thermal-mechanical or electrical properties. However, it remains to a challenge to find an approach, with a wide choice of materials, to realize high resolution multi-material 3D printing efficiently. In this study, an innovative hybrid multi-material 3D printing system is developed, which integrates digital light processing (DLP), and direct ink writing (DIW). Here, DLP can efficiently provide a high-resolution matrix, with complex geometry and multicolor appearance, while DIW can add functionality to the component due to the wide choice of functional materials, such as shape memory photopolymers, conductive inks, and liquid crystal elastomers (LCE). With this hybrid 3D printing system, multicolor functional devices, circuit-embedding architectures, soft sensors, hybrid active lattices, active tensegrities, functionally graded actuators, and pure LCE lattices were successfully fabricated, showing a great prospect in the area of electronics, smart wearable devices, soft robots and actuators. Join online: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/97549012057