Effects of polymer composition on 3DP-induced alignment of elastomeric block copolymers

Many emerging 3D printing technologies aim to achieve spatially graded material properties within individual objects to locally program functional properties, often by leveraging multi-material extrusion techniques or multicomponent resins. In contrast, we have demonstrated the ability to induce nearly two orders of magnitude in functional mechanical anisotropy in a single nanostructured elastomeric SEBS block copolymer. We leverage the coupled shear and extensional flows intrinsic to 3D printing to achieve highly oriented block copolymer nanostructures, leading to locally programmable anisotropic properties via tailored print paths. Here we investigate several compositions of commercially available cylinder-forming SEBS materials to systematically explore how chain dynamics and the proximity of order-order and order-disorder transitions impact nanostructured block copolymer orientation in response to the flows and post-processing steps of 3D printing.