Congratulations to Jen-Yu Huang and all co-authors on the paper “Three-Dimensional Printing of Hierarchical Porous Architectures” which will be published in Chemistry of Materials; https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chemmater.9b02761
Porous materials are notoriously difficult to process, so synthetic materials are mostly in the form of powder but generally lack mesoscale structure much less processability into complex device architectures. Natural systems, on the other hand, a replete with complex hierarchical and multifunctional structures. Inspired by the beautifully complex hierarchical structures found in nature, we sought to create analogous programmable materials from inorganic building blocks. The work described in the enclosed manuscript illustrates the rich opportunity space that opened up at the intersection from recent concurrent advances in (digital) additive manufacturing and nanostructured material building blocks. We show, for the first time, that three-dimensional hierarchical materials can be printed into porous structured based on oxozirconium methacrylate cluster building blocks. This work demarks a significant step forward in creating hierarchical porous structures with control over complex macroscopic structure as well as controlled pore size distribution. The advances towards programmable porous materials reported in this manuscript have important implications for a broad range of emerging technologies spanning microfluidic bioseparation and programmable multiphase flow through porous structures.
Congratulations to Jen-Yu and all co-authors!