An Overview on 3D Printing of Structured Porous Materials and Their Applications

Abstract

Porous materials play an essential role in chemical processes such as catalysis, adsorption, and in emerging technologies for electronic materials, light harvesting, and energy transfer. By far, zeolites have contributed most to industrial development. Other porous solid such as activated carbon, metal–organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, and porous coordination polymers also have been studied by researchers in the past two decades. The use of porous solids is set to grow in the future, and so is the need to fabricate them into more complex and diverse geometries for a variety of applications. Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, has provided the possibility to shape the materials into desired forms, which offers many advantages over their traditional configurations. Structured catalysts, for example, can help to overcome the drawbacks of conventional packed catalyst bed-like mass or heat transfer limitations and high pressure drop. This review focuses on the latest advances as well as the current challenges in 3D printing of the porous solids. This article aims to contribute to the shape engineering of porous solids and provide a better understanding of their formulations, structures, techniques, properties, and applications.