Process Development for Microscale Robotic Deposition of Concentrated Colloidal Gels

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This grant provides funds for the development of a processing tool, as well as a processing planning system, for the rapid deposition of concentrated colloidal gels. This is a solid freeform fabrication technology and the current grant is focused at performing deposition based fabrication on length scales the order of microns. The tool to be developed is a robotic system consisting of dual stage serving axes in 3 dimensions. A coarse stage driven by linear motors will carry a fine stage driven by piezos which will actually support the deposition head. Process modeling will be performed to determine material flow behavior and solidification characteristics. These models will then be used in a process planning CAE tool to determine optimal machine processing conditions. The overall project will fuse together expertise from the fields of Robotics, Controls, Manufacturing, and Materials Science to create very small scale periodic structures in an extremely rapid fashion.If successful, this work will enable the creation of microscale periodic lattices. By developing intentional defects in the structures, these lattices can then be used to provide optical waveguide capability for advanced photonic devices. The benefit of the proposed method is the time taken to construct such devices. While standard lithography methods can achieve the same resolution, the time for processing is on the order of days. The current system will have build times on the order of minutes. This will allow for the exploration of a huge design space in creating photonic bandgap structures that could be the future backbone of computing and communication applications.