The 3D printing of polymer materials

as an advanced and rapidly developed manufacturing technology

can fabricate polymer parts with very complicated shape and structure that can

t be achieved by traditional polymer processing technology. However

it is difficult to prepare the polymer devices with desired shapes and functions due to only few single component polymer materials suitable for 3D printing. This paper introduced our research work on 3D printing of polymer based micro/nano functional composites. By using organic-inorganic hybrid

solid state shear milling

ultrasonic irradiation

molecular complexation

etc.

a series of polymer-based micro/nano functional composites suitable for selective laser sintering (SLS) and fused deposition modeling (FDM) processing were successfully prepared. The SLS processing of functional polymer-based micro/nano composite powders and FDM processing of functional composite filaments were successfully realized. The low-dimensional construction

layer by layer superposition

free interface forming and complicated solid-liquid-solid phase transition in 3D printing process were investigated. The novel technique for spheroidization of polymer-based micro/nano powders was established

and the new directly melt-extruded FDM printer was invented. A lot of polymer parts with complicated geometric shapes and functions

such as PA11/BaTiO

3

piezoelectric device

flexible PU/CNTs sensor

individualized mandible model

etc.

which can' t be manufactured by traditional polymer processing technology

were successfully fabricated by optimizing 3D printing process. This is a big breakthrough in manufacturing polymer parts with complicated shapes and functions that can' t be prepared by traditional polymer processing and the current 3D printing technologies.