3D Printing of Multifunctional Materials for Energy Applications

With the increasing inventory of advanced materials and multiscale composites introduced into the energy field, there is a pressing need for scalable manufacturing techniques that are compatible with these material systems. This bottleneck can be addressed by 3D printing because it offers many advantages such as scalability, simplification of the fabrication processes, increasing design freedom, and reducing both energy and material consumption. In this seminar, I’ll present two case studies on 3D printing of two emerging functional materials for energy storage and harvesting applications. In the first part, I will discuss a novel 3D printing for two-dimensional (2D) transition metal carbides and nitrides (known as MXenes) that was developed to fabricate high-performance micro supercapacitors. Our printing method allowed a great control over the arrangement of MXene microstructures for the first time and our devices had almost ten orders of magnitude higher energy density with comparable power densities. The second part of my talk will cover my recent work on 3D printing of liquid metal elastomer composites for wearable thermoelectric energy harvesters. The mechanical flexibility and thermal conductivity of the layers are engineered by controlling the size of liquid metal inclusions and printing parameters. The fabricated devices show high energy harvesting performance (> 400 mV (25mV cm-2) at ΔT = 60°C) and great stretchability of more than 40% strain. These studies show that overcoming challenges in 3D printing of such functional materials can pave the road for practical use of the newly developed materials and make an impact in various fields of study from energy to human health monitoring. 

Halil Tetik is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. He is currently studying various additive manufacturing methods for soft multifunctional composites and wearable electronics under Prof. Mohammad Malakooti’s supervision. Halil received his PhD in Industrial Engineering from Kansas State University, where he worked with Prof. Dong Lin on additive manufacturing of functional aerogels by a novel 3D printing method. He has MSc and BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey. His MSc research focused on modelling and control of parallel robotic manipulators, and he has an experience in the industry where he served as a manufacturing engineer at a local company in Izmir, Turkey. Halil has published more than 10 journal articles in high-impact journals including Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, and Additive Manufacturing. His work on 3D printed cellulose-based aerogels received the prestigious Outstanding Paper Award in North American Manufacturing Research Conference (NAMRC) 49.