Chemically active 3D prints win the 2016 Altmetrics Award

20th January 2017

National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS)

Enaie Azambuja

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Intense interest in results demonstrating the chemical reactivity of nanocomposites in 3D printed structures on social media leads to STAM 2016 Altmetrics Award. “People (secretly, sometimes) love having control. They love to be able to design and create and build. 3D printing facilitates this kind of creative control,” suggests Matthew Hartings, a researcher at the American University. “With the technologies that we are developing, we are adding a 4th dimension to 3D printing: chemistry.”

Despite the interest 3D printing has attracted, in chemistry so far the technique has been confined to producing structures to help research other materials and structures – such as reactionware - rather than producing structures to be studied themselves. “As a chemist, printed things are kind of boring,” explains Hartings. “I wanted 3D printed objects to be able to do chemistry after they were printed.”

Together with researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Food and Drug Administration, Hartings has demonstrated that titanium oxide nanoparticles blended into a 3D printed polymer not only enhance the mechanical properties of the structure but also the chemical properties.

The Science and Technology of Advanced Materials paper reporting the results attracted so many references in mainstream and social media that it has been awarded the journal’s 2016 Altmetric Award. For Hartings winning the award was a gratifying indication that their research was breaking out of academia and attracting interest from non-specialists.

Chemistry with nanoparticles embedded in a 3D-printed polymer composite is possible because polymers are innately permeable. However Hartings points out that the polymer used in the reported results is not optimally suited to the kind of chemistry they are trying to support, leaving lots of room for future work.

“I'm really interested in the way that our 3D printed nanocomposites can store and filter gases,” says Hartings. “Developing new ways to trap gases like carbon dioxide and hydrogen and methane will have huge implications for our environment and society.”