The Electric-Field-Driven Fusion Jetting 3D Printing for Fabricating High Resolution Polylactic Acid/Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotube Composite Micro-Scale Structures

Existing 3D printing techniques are still facing the challenge of low resolution for fabricating polymer matrix composites, inhibiting the wide engineering applications for the biomedical engineering (biomimetic scaffolds), micro fuel cells, and micro-electronics. In order to achieve high resolution fabrication of polylactic acid (PLA)/multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) composites, this paper presents an electric-field-driven (EFD) fusion jetting 3D printing method by combining the mixing effect and material feeding of the micro-screw and the necking effect of Taylor cone by the EFD. The effects of main process parameters (the carbon loading, the voltage, the screw speed, and the printing speed) on the line width and the printing quality were studied and optimized. To demonstrate the printing capability of this proposed method, meshes with line width of 30 µm to 100 μm and 1 wt.% to 5 wt.% MWCNT for the application of conductive biomimetic scaffold and the anisotropic flexible meshes were prepared. The electrical properties were investigated to present the frequency dependence of the alternating current conductivity and the dielectric loss (tanδ), and the microstructures of printed structures demonstrated the uniformly dispersed MWCNT in PLA matrix. Therefore, it provides a new solution to fabricate micro-scale structures of composite materials, especially the 3D conductive biomimetic scaffolds.