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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Overcoming a current limitation in the 3D printing process
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2016-10-26 19:00:00
	Description:		One of the current limitations of commercial 3D printers on the market is the lack of material that’s being used. Mostly it’s thermoplastics, like ABS. So what researchers would like to do is expand the materials used to fabricate devices or functional materials. Engineer Chen Zhu of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says they teamed up with the University of California, Santa Cruz to do just that. What they came up with was a novel, ultra-lightweight graphene aerogel. "Graphene is a very unique material, so first we developed the graphene aerogel ink that’s a printable ink. So, that means the material is easy to flow through the very small nozzle and after squeezing the printing, the material can maintain the shape and it’s not going to shrink or collapse or deform. It can maintain whatever shape we print it and then we can do the heat treatment to get very good performance of the graphene." The team also modified the technique to minimize clogging during printing.
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