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

这个I-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是开发一种可扩展的工艺，以制造具有高分辨率和高吞吐量的三维纳米结构。所提出的技术可以产生具有优于传统块体材料的上级机械、光学和热性质的纳米结构。三维纳米结构材料和纳米晶格在电子、光子和太阳能等工业中有许多应用，这是由于在传统宏观尺度材料中观察不到的物理性质。纳米结构材料可以具有超低密度，同时具有高刚度和强度。高孔隙率结构还可以具有类似空气的性质，例如低折射率和介电常数，其可以用于光捕获并增强波导和集成光子学的性能。纳米晶格结构预计具有极低的导热率，可用作航空航天应用的轻质隔热体。机械、光学和热性能的组合允许纳米结构材料用作集成电路、多层光子器件中的绝缘层，以及用作任意表面上的薄膜涂层。该材料也可用于多层涂层中作为具有低导热性的高效介电反射器，其可用作辐射屏蔽或冷却装置。I-Corps项目基于超多孔纳米晶格材料的光刻纳米制造工艺的开发。 所提出的技术使用胶体颗粒，可以利用这些胶体颗粒来创建用于三维（3D）图案化的体积强度。 使用“自上而下”光刻和“自下而上”自组装方法，所提出的方法能够使用来自自组装纳米颗粒的光散射用于光敏聚合物的体积曝光。这导致了一种高度通用的过程，并且该过程仅基于可以通过控制光和粒子参数来设计的粒子-光相互作用。此外，与传统技术相比，所提出的技术可以是低成本的，并且不需要大量的光学、电气或机械硬件。所提出的工艺也是高度可扩展的，并且基于该技术的卷对卷原型系统已经证明了以180 mm/min的吞吐量在柔性基底上连续打印3D纳米结构。纳米结构和纳米器件的制造通常受到图案分辨率和生产量之间的权衡的限制。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.