Additive Manufacturing of Polymers

Hierarchical Materials

This program seeks to develop fundamental structure-property measurements to support advanced manufacturing of a new class of composites. Our focus is on damage resistant materials with long term performance. Read more. 

Project Leader: Zois Tsinas

Multifunctional 3D Printable Polymer-Metal Composites

Our goal is to support innovation and fundamental research in additive manufacturing of multifunctional materials with low energy consumption, facilitating the transition from cutting-edge materials science to future AM technologies for multifunctional 3D hierarchical metallic and composite structures. Read more.

Project Leader: Ran Tao

Photopolymer Additive Manufacturing

NIST's goal is to support innovation in the photopolymer additive manufacturing (PAM) industry by enabling unprecedented high-resolution, mechanically-precise vat photopolymerization via fundamental understanding informed by novel voxel and sub-voxel-scale characterization throughout all major stages of the printing process. Read more.

Project Leaders: Jason Killgore & Callie Higgins

Polymer Additive Manufacturing and Rheology 

We develop instrumentation and methodologies for measurement of temperature and stress fields in polymeric materials and their real-time materials responses. We focus on measurements where national needs have been identified, such as plastics recycling and composite curing, and in emerging areas that represent sources of new U.S. manufacturing, such as additive manufacturing. Read more. 

• Polymer Material Extrusion
  Project Leader: Anthony Kotula
• Bioprinting
  Project Leader: Anthony Kotula
• Dense Suspensions and Thermoset AM
  Project Leaders: Anthony Kotula & Jonathan Seppala
• Polymer AM for Sheet Metal Forming
  Project Leader: Jonathan Seppala

Additive Manufacturing Benchmark Test Series

AM Bench provides a continuing series of AM benchmark measurements, challenge problems, and conferences with the primary goal of enabling modelers to test their simulations against rigorous, highly controlled additive manufacturing benchmark measurement data. Read more. 

Project Leader: Lyle Levine 

Additive Manufacturing of Ceramics

Additive manufacturing of ceramics seeks to facilitate the commercialization of ceramics AM via the concurrent development of new measurement approaches, characterization, and computational methods for ceramic materials. Read more. 

Project Leader: Russell Maier

Biofabrication of Tissue Engineered Constructs 

In the field of tissue engineering, 3D scaffolds and cells are often combined to yield constructs that are used as therapeutics to repair or restore tissue function in patients. Our project developed a noninvasive, label-free, 3D optical coherence tomography (OCT) method to rapidly image large sample volumes to assess cell viability and distribution within scaffolds. Read more.

Project Leaders: Carl Simon & Greta Babakhanova

Point-of-Care Pharmaceutical Manufacturing & Precision Medicine

Advancements in manufacturing technologies can aid the move from few rigid centralized pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities toward many agile distributed manufacturing and point-of-care (POC) manufacturing facilities to enable personalized and precision medicine. Read more.

Project Leaders: Thomas Forbes & Greg Gillen