my name is eric duoss i'm a research engineer here at lawrence livermore national laboratory i work on new additive manufacturing or 3d printing technologies specifically developing new materials for those processes for a wide range of end applications. 3d printing or additive manufacturing is really powerful because it gives you the possibility of
controlling now very precisely composition and structure. and often you can do that at the micro scales or even nano scales now. one example that we've been developing here at lawrence livermore are mechanical energy absorbing materials. these are things that will resist an impact. one can think about in the context of a smart phone
drops and cracks due to drops. could you design a better mechanical energy absorbing material to cushion that impact. one of the things that we're very interested in pursuing with three-dimensional printing is energy storage. for example lithium-ion batteries for electrochemical energy storage. this is just a mock-up and you
can start to print these active materials. in this case you might have the red material be a cathode, the blue material be an anode and you can better distribute them in space as opposed to planar stack ups or films of active materials which are typically what batteries are composed of. in a normal battery that layers are thicker
so it can store more energy but it can't charge and discharge as quickly. but now if you architect them in three dimensions you can get the best of both worlds. in traditional smartphones there are a lot of rare earth critical materials that often they'll end up in a landfill there's more and more efforts to recover those but that in and of itself causes problems.
it's very laborious often these materials are toxic so with carbon-based electrodes such as these graphing aerogels one can think about really limiting the environmental impact especially when it comes to smartphones simply because its carbon and it has very typically very benign impact to the environment.
there is increasing interest
3d printing impact on manufacturing,in this emerging technology and i think you're going to start to see 3d printed elements show up in smart phone technology very very soon.
