Additive Manufacturing has seen rapid growth in industrial, healthcare and defense applications. However, the lack of processable materials has stymied its further adoption. Most additive manufacturing approaches deal with single, homogenous materials, including plastics, metals and ceramics. Moving beyond homogenous materials, adding multi-materials, gradient, functional/responsive materials, and materials with heterogenous and graded properties is compelling. Expanding the material pallets and assembling of a variety of different materials may open up a new paradigm in product design, prototyping and manufacturing, significantly reducing the design-to-product cycle. Multi-material additive manufacturing is one enabler for 4D printing through the printing of tunable, responsive materials. It may also enable new materials, products and engineered systems with unprecedented functionalities and properties.
New challenges and opportunities arise in multi-material additive manufacturing, which calls for new research in the science of new additive manufacturing processes, material design and characterizations, computational design and optimization methodologies needed to advance the state of art of realizing multi-functional products composed of multiple- and stimuli-responsive materials.
Contributing papers are solicited in the following areas:
• Multi-material additive manufacturing processes and apparatus
• Hybrid Manufacturing
• 4D printing of responsive materials
• Mechanics and characterizations of dissimilar material interface and joining
• Multi-material topology optimizations and design automation methodologies for multi-material components
• Multi-material architected materials and metamaterials
• 3D printed soft robotics and responsive materials