In wind farms across North America and Europe, sleek turbines equipped with state-of-the-art technology convert wind energy into electric power. But tucked inside the blades of these feats of modern engineering is a decidedly low-tech core material: balsa wood.
Like other manufactured products that use sandwich panel construction to achieve a combination of light weight and strength, turbine blades contain carefully arrayed strips of balsa wood from Ecuador, which provides 95 percent of the world’s supply.
For centuries, the fast-growing balsa tree has been prized for its light weight and stiffness relative to density. But balsa wood is expensive and natural variations in the grain can be an impediment to achieving the increasingly precise performance requirements of turbine blades and other sophisticated applications.
As turbine makers produce ever-larger blades—the longest now measure 75 meters, almost matching the wingspan of an Airbus A380 jetliner—they must be engineered to operate virtually maintenance-free for decades. In order to meet more demanding specifications for precision, weight, and quality consistency, manufacturers are searching for new sandwich construction material options.
Until now, 3D printing has been developed for thermo plastics and UV-curable resins—materials that are not typically considered as engineering solutions for structural applications. “By moving into new classes of materials like epoxies, we open up new avenues for using 3D printing to construct lightweight architectures,” says principal investigator Jennifer A. Lewis, the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard SEAS. “Essentially, we are broadening the materials palette for 3D printing.”
“Balsa wood has a cellular architecture that minimizes its weight since most of the space is empty and only the cell walls carry the load. It therefore has a high specific stiffness and strength,” explains Lewis, who in addition to her role at Harvard SEAS is also a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute. “We’ve borrowed this design concept and mimicked it in an engineered composite.”
Lewis and Brett G. Compton, a former postdoctoral fellow in her group, developed inks of epoxy resins, spiked with viscosity-enhancing nanoclay platelets and a compound called dimethyl methylphosphonate, and then added two types of fillers: tiny silicon carbide “whiskers” and discrete carbon fibers. Key to the versatility of the resulting fiber-filled inks is the ability to control the orientation of the fillers.
"This paper demonstrates, for the first time, 3D printing of honeycombs with fiber-reinforced cell walls..."Lorna Gibson, a professor of materials science and mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The direction that the fillers are deposited controls the strength of the materials (think of the ease of splitting a piece of firewood lengthwise versus the relative difficulty of chopping on the perpendicular against the grain).
Lewis and Compton have shown that their technique yields cellular composites that are as stiff as wood, 10 to 20 times stiffer than commercial 3D-printed polymers, and twice as strong as the best printed polymer composites. The ability to control the alignment of the fillers means that fabricators can digitally integrate the composition, stiffness, and toughness of an object with its design.
“This paper demonstrates, for the first time, 3D printing of honeycombs with fiber-reinforced cell walls,” said Lorna Gibson, a professor of materials science and mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of world’s leading experts in cellular composites, who was not involved in this research. “Of particular significance is the way that the fibers can be aligned, through control of the fiber aspect ratio—the length relative to the diameter—and the nozzle diameter. This marks an important step forward in designing engineering materials that mimic wood, long known for its remarkable mechanical properties for its weight.”
3D printing has the potential to radically change manufacturing in other ways too. Lewis says the next step will be to test the use of thermosetting resins to create different kinds of architectures, especially by exploiting the technique of blending fillers and precisely aligning them. This could lead to advances not only in structural materials, but also in conductive composites.
This story is reprinted from material from Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.