Recent advances in additive manufacturing of bio-inspired materials

Abstract

The changing scenario in the rapidly developing economies and industries requires bulk-scale fabrication of materials. The production of materials on such a large scale by industries requires high quality, low-cost production, and high efficiency, in order to sustain the innovative market competition. Complexities like high initial tooling, part design restrictions, bounded degree of designing freedom, and machinery cost in traditional manufacturing have led to the need of new approaches and techniques of manufacturing. To overcome these complexities, additive manufacturing (i.e. 3D Printing) has been proven to be a paramount method, which has the potential to perform all the operations in one place such as cutting, forming, bending or transforming materials and components for further assembling in one part and in short time, due to which it is also useful in biomedical applications from medicine to anthropology. Recently, the polymers have become prime choice of the materials for additive manufacturing, and various thermoplastic materials like acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and polylactic acid (PLA) together with thermosetting polymeric materials can be easily processed by 3D printing. This chapter discusses 3D printing of various biologically inspired structures like molluscan shell and honeycomb structurewith above-mentioned matrix materials and their reinforce-ments with synthetic and natural fibres. The developed materials were characterized via Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), wear test analysis and impact strength analysis (ASTM standard). Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion on future scope of 4D printing for additive manufacturing.