Dialling up performance for on demand manufacturing

3D打印在各行各业引起了巨大的兴奋-它提供了灵活、个性化和按需可扩展的制造，使人们有机会创造具有几何/组成自由和先进功能的新产品，这是传统制造实践无法实现的。3D打印技术进展迅速：在聚合物领域，我们已经看到，通过投影微立体光刻、多材料喷墨打印和双光子聚合技术的发展，我们能够制造具有高分辨率投影的高功能结构的能力取得了重大进展。随着计算轴向光刻技术的出现和最近的工作，如XOLO，在体积3DP方面也取得了令人兴奋的进展。除了这些进步之外，在材料方面也有了发展，例如，使用响应性聚合物和3DP上的机器学习/人工智能开始融入我们的理解的“4D打印”的出现。这些进步的影响是巨大的，但3D打印技术正在达到一个临界点，必须将多种努力(材料、设计、工艺、产品)结合在一起，以克服阻碍工业大规模使用的障碍，即所生产的材料往往性能较差，而且很难将它们与特定的工艺相匹配，几乎没有选择来改变这一点。业界普遍发现，采用这项前景看好的技术或利用材料或设计的先进功能并非易事，尤其是在我们在这项计划拨款中瞄准的生物技术行业--他们有采用3D打印的意愿和愿望，但目前从概念到实现的挑战太严峻了。阻碍3D打印应用的一个关键挑战是从产品创意到产品实现的能力：工作流程的每个步骤(例如，材料、设计、工艺、产品)都有重大的相互依存的挑战，这意味着只有集成的方法才能最终取得成功。业界告诉我们，他们需要大大超越目前的理解，嵌入高级功能的制造产品需要能够快速、可预测和可靠地“拨号”性能，以满足特定行业的需求和特定的高级功能。本质上，我们需要采取自下而上的科学方法，将材料、设计和工艺整合在一起，使我们能够生产先进的功能产品。因此，我们克服了与使用3DP识别、选择和加工材料相关的挑战，以促进这一关键制造方法的更广泛采用，特别是在英国的关键经济部门：再生医学、制药和生物催化。我们的项目将考虑四个研究挑战(RCS)：产品：我们如何利用3D打印和先进聚合物来创建智能的21世纪产品，供多个部门使用？材料：我们如何创建能够控制高级功能/发布的材料，并且是3D可打印的？设计：我们如何使用计算/算法方法来支持材料识别/产品设计？流程：我们如何整合合成、筛选和制造流程，以缩短开发和翻译流程，以便我们能够‘拨号’材料/特性？通过整合这些挑战，并以整体、总体的观点看待如何实现先进、高功能的定制3D打印产品，这些产品有可能改变英国的高价值生物技术领域和更远的领域。

3D Printing elicits tremendous excitement from a broad variety of industry - it offers flexible, personalised and on demand scalable manufacture, affording the opportunity to create new products with geometrical / compositional freedoms and advanced functions that are not possible with traditional manufacturing practices. 3D Printing progresses rapidly: for polymerics, we have seen significant advances in our ability to be able to manufacture highly functional structures with high resolution projection through developments in projection micro stereolithography, multimaterial ink jet printing and two photon polymerisation. There have also been exciting advances in volumetric 3DP with the emergence of Computational Axial Lithography and more recent work such as 'xolo'. Alongside these advances there has also been developments in materials, e.g., in the emergence of '4D printing' using responsive polymers and machine learning / AI on 3DP is beginning to be incorporated into our understanding. The impact of these advances is significant, but 3D printing technology is reaching a tipping point where the multiple streams of effort (materials, design, process, product) must be brought together to overcome the barriers that prevent mass take up by industry, i.e., materials produced can often have poor performance and it is challenging to match them to specific processes, with few options available to change this. Industry in general have not found it easy to adopt this promising technology or exploit advanced functionality of materials or design, and this is particularly true in the biotech industries who we target in this programme grant - there is the will and the aspiration to adopt 3D printing but the challenges in going from concept to realisation are currently too steep. A key challenge stymying the adoption of 3D printing is the ability to go from product idea to product realisation: each step of the workflow (e.g., materials, design, process, product) has significant inter-dependent challenges that means only an integrated approach can ultimately be successful. Industry tells us that they need to go significantly beyond current understanding and that manufacturing products embedded with advanced functionality needs the capability to quickly, predictably, and reliably 'dial up' performance, to meet sector specific needs and specific advanced functionalities. In essence, we need to take a bottom-up, scientific approach to integrate materials, design and process to enable us to produce advanced functional products. It is therefore critical we overcome the challenges associated with identifying, selecting, and processing materials with 3DP in order to facilitate wider adoption of this pivotal manufacturing approach, particularly within the key UK sectors of the economy: regenerative medicine, pharmaceutical and biocatalysis.Our project will consider four Research Challenges (RCs):PRODUCT: How can we exploit 3D printing and advanced polymers to create smart 21st Century products ready for use across multiple sectors? MATERIALS: How can we create the materials that can enable control over advanced functionality / release, that are 3D Printable?DESIGN: How can we use computational / algorithmic approaches to support materials identification / product design? PROCESS: How can we integrate synthesis, screening and manufacturing processes to shorten the development and translation pipeline so that we can 'dial up' materials / properties?By integrating these challenges, and taking a holistic, overarching view on how to realise advanced, highly functional bespoke 3D printed products that have the potential to transform UK high value biotechnology fields and beyond.