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Nanogrooved carbon microtubes for wet three-dimensional printing of conductive composite structures

journal contribution
posted on 2019-05-01, 00:00 authored by Bijan Nasri-Nasrabadi, Akif KaynakAkif Kaynak, Shayan Seyedin, Zahra Komeily Nia, Abbas KouzaniAbbas Kouzani
Recent advances in three-dimensional (3D) printing have enabled the fabrication of interesting structures which are not achievable using traditional fabrication approaches. The 3D printing of carbon microtube composite inks allows fabrication of conductive structures for practical applications in soft robotics and tissue engineering. However, it is challenging to achieve 3D printed structures from solution-based composite inks, which requires an additional process to solidify the ink. Here, we introduce a wet 3D printing technique which uses a coagulation bath to fabricate carbon microtube composite structures. We show that through a facile nanogrooving approach which introduces cavitation and channels on carbon microtubes, enhanced interfacial interactions with a chitosan polymer matrix are achieved. Consequently, the mechanical properties of the 3D printed composites improve when nanogrooved carbon microtubes are used, compared to untreated microtubes. We show that by carefully controlling the coagulation bath, extrusion pressure, printing distance and printed line distance, we can 3D print composite lattices which are composed of well-defined and separated printed lines. The conductive composite 3D structures with highly customised design presented in this work provide a suitable platform for applications ranging from soft robotics to smart tissue engineering scaffolds.

History

Journal

Polymer international

Volume

68

Issue

5

Pagination

922 - 928

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons

Location

Chichester, Eng.

ISSN

0959-8103

eISSN

1097-0126

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2019, Society of Chemical Industry

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