I-Corps: High-Throughout Manufacturing of Three-Dimensional Nanostructured Materials

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a scalable process to manufacture three-dimensional nanostructures with high resolution and throughput. The proposed technology may create nanostructures that have mechanical, optical, and thermal properties that are superior to traditional bulk materials. Three-dimensional nanostructured materials and nanolattices have many applications in industries such as electronics, photonics, and solar energy due to physical properties not observed in traditional macroscale materials. Nanostructured materials can have ultralow density and simultaneously have high stiffness and strength. The high porosity structures also can have air-like properties, such as low refractive index and dielectric constant, which can be used for light trapping and enhance the performance of waveguide and integrated photonics. Nanolattice structures are expected to have extremely low thermal conductivity and can be used as a lightweight thermal insulator for aerospace applications. The combination of mechanical, optical, and thermal properties allows the nanostructured materials to be used as an insulating layer in integrated circuits, multilayer photonic devices, and as thin-film coating on arbitrary surfaces. The material also may be used in multilayer coating as a high efficiency dielectric reflector that has low thermal conductivity, which may be used as a radiation shield or in cooling devices.This I-Corps project is based on the development of a lithographic nanomanufacturing process of ultraporous nanolattice materials. The proposed technology uses colloidal particles that may be harnessed to create volumetric intensity for three-dimensional (3D) patterning. Using both “top-down” lithographic and “bottom-up” self-assembly approaches, the proposed method is enabled using light scattering from self-assembled nanoparticles for volumetric exposure of a photosensitive polymer. This results in a process that is highly versatile and solely based on particle-light interactions that may be designed by controlling the light and particle parameters. In addition, in contrast to traditional techniques, the proposed technology may be low-cost and does not require extensive optical, electrical, or mechanical hardware. The proposed process also is highly scalable, and a roll-to-roll prototype system based on this technology has demonstrated continuous printing of 3D nanostructures on flexible substrate with 180 mm/min throughput. Manufacturing of nanostructures and nanodevices generally is limited by a tradeoff between pattern resolution and throughput. The proposed technology overcomes this challenge by using massively parallel colloidal elements for volumetric patterning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.