International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing

Special Issue on ‘3D Printing of Soft Materials’

Guest Editor:

Associate Professor Qi Ge

Southern University of Science and Technology

China

Soft materials such as rubbers, gels, biomaterials are ubiquitous in nature. Compared with their hard counterparts, soft materials usually exhibit unique nonlinear mechanical behavior with large deformation. In addition, there are a type of attractive soft active materials that are able to undergo large mechanical deformation in response to external stimuli, and therefore have great potential in impactful applications. However, despite of the recent rapid progresses on theoretical studies and application explorations, the manufacturing approaches applied to process soft materials mainly restricted to the traditional manufacturing approaches, which greatly limit the functionality and performance of structures and devices made of soft materials. Additive manufacturing, also known as “3D printing”, allows the creation of complex 3D geometries with precisely prescribed microarchitectures. Therefore, it is highly desired to apply 3D printing to the manufacturing of 3D structures and devices made of soft materials.

The aim of this special theme is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to present and review the state-of-the-art development, premier challenges and foresight visions in 3D printing of soft materials, with an emphasis on new 3D printing techniques, new materials, new processes, and new applications. Extreme manufacturing parameters with ultrasmall size, ultrahigh precision, large area, complex geometry and high performance are preferred.

Possible topics, within this scope, include but are not limited to:

High-resolution/multimaterial/multiscale 3D printing for processing soft materials
Physical field assisted 3D printing for processing soft materials
3D printing with shape memory polymers
3D printing with hydrogels
3D printing with liquid crystal elastomers
3D printing with magnetic responsive materials
3D printing of flexible electronics