Printing amorphous high-performance polymers.

Processing very high-performance polymers is challenging. 3D printing such materials is near impossible. Reactive precursors enable printing of amorphous thermoplastics like PEI (polyether imides, e.g., Ultem®) and PAI (polyamid imides, e.g., Torlon®), materials currently unprintable using SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) and very challenging with FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling). By using low MW reactive oligomers, we generate readily printable materials with high glass transition temperatures, Tg 200 ~ 300o C. Our reactive resins are designed to be printer agnostic and are amenable to commercial scale-up.

I will describe the motivation for and the chemistry underlying our approach to 3D print very high-performance polymers.