APR 13, 2026

Max Saccone

University of Colorado Boulder 

Photopolymer-based Additive Manufacturing of Metals, Ceramics, and Carbon Materials

ABSTRACT: Photopolymers can be used as scaffolds, reactors, or reactants in materials transformations that yield architected materials such as metals, ceramics, and hard carbons. To break paradigms of accessible material class and resolution, these processes typically rely on heating additively manufactured parts in a reactive environment to drive polymer decomposition and precursor conversion to target materials. In this talk, we will cover several material systems, to highlight how polymer chemistry, reaction conditions, and reactor design influence polymer conversion processes to form inorganic materials.

A useful approach for introducing precursors to photopolymer templates is through solute sorption. For example, hydrogel infusion additive manufacturing (HIAM) relies on sorption of metal salts to enable fabrication of many metals such as copper, nickel, tungsten, and multicomponent alloys from a single photoresin system using an infusion-reaction paradigm. In this process, 3D printed hydrogels are swelled with aqueous metal precursors, then calcined and reduced to create miniaturized metal replicas, enabling quick iteration, compositional tuning, and multimaterial fabrication. This infusion-reaction approach has recently been extended to create composites containing polyacrylonitrile, a conventionally hard-to-print polymer that can be pyrolyzed to form architected carbon materials with carbon yields above 40%. Finally, we will share ongoing work towards understanding and tuning interactions between photopolymer scaffolds and solutes, which has applications for controlling alloy composition during HIAM, as well as in other areas such as drug delivery and critical mineral recovery.

MAY 11, 2026

Kaiwen Hsiao

Texas A&M University

Programming Micron- and Nano-Resolution Polymer Structure and Property with Light